Book 5: "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto"

Organic food: it's for everyone, not just yuppies!

Whereas the last Pollan book I read, The Ominvore's Dilemma, raised awareness about where our food comes from, In Defense of Food, simply answers the query about what to eat.  Another difference between this book and the one I read two books ago is that this one is less experiential. Pollan gathered his research and wrote the book all from home, whereas The Omnivore's Dilemma, required him to go out in the field and experience. The result is a shorter book (about 200 pages)  and also a more straight-forward guidebook on eating. 

Guess what I'm doing right now? That's right, I'm eating lunch. I packed home lunch, which is really cold leftovers from last night's dinner. My mother made a fantastic, savory whole roast chicken, along with toss salad and chow mein noodles. On first glance, last night's dinner (and today's lunch) sounds pretty healthy--she buys most of her ingredients from Whole Foods, so I'm confident that the chicken was free-range and vegan, and the veggies in the chow mein and salad were organic--but if there's one thing I've learned from reading Michael Pollan's work it's that food always has a hidden story and that it is always worse for you than you think. 

Why do I keep reading books about food? As I've mentioned earlier, my family is all about health. We were raised, from a very early age, to take care of ourselves not only physically through exercise (playing competitive tennis with practice 5-6 times per week and tournaments on weekends made physical activity a given) but also through ingestion. Although we got all the shots required by our schools, we primarily relied on naturopathic "medicine" (more like supplements) when we got sick. My mother was the instigator of all of the emphasis on good health and nutrition. She went beyond the FDA guidelines and, through her own reading (she knew most of what I read in Michael Pollan's book), served us meals with both taste and wholesome quality. In doing so, she unknowingly participated in what Pollan calls "culture." She helped me understand what he meant when he suggested that we stop eating out, stop listening to dietary guidelines and stop encouraging the mainstream food industry by putting our dollars where our beliefs were. Before Whole Foods set up shop in Hawaii, she got the majority of our produce and pre-prepared food from Down to Earth, which was the rare "healthful" store back when we were growing up. As you can see, our foundation in food was exceptionally advanced. My mother and the way she brought me up is really the reason I decided to buy all of Pollan's food books. Yes, me reading about food is a little redundant and it's like an army recruiter trying to convince enrolled soldiers to join, but I still found much value in this book (as well as The Omnivore's Dilemma). Since eating and living healthy is the kind of lifestyle I enjoy pursuing (thanks, mom!), food books are perfect for furthering myself in my pursuit of enduring good health. 

At the same time, for someone who purports to have such a good health foundation, I am remarkably ignorant when it comes to food, food preparation and nutrients. Of course one of the points Pollan made in this book is that it is all but impossible for the layperson to keep up and interpret the constant flow of nutritional fads and information coming out (hence the closed doors of nutritionalism), but with more self-education, I believe I will be able to understand the why behind the way we eat and live. Reading more food books is my way of helping myself become a more educated version of who I am. 

Terms

• Nutritional Industrial Complex: 1) What matters most is not the food but the 'nutrient'; 2) Because nutrients are invisible and incomprehensible to everyone but scientists, we need expert help in deciding what to eat; 3) The purpose of eating is to promote a narrow concept of physical health; comprised of scientists, the government, and food marketers.
• Orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obsession with eating healthy.
• American paradox: a notably unhealthy population preoccupied with nutrition and diet and the idea of eating healthy. "Orthorexia nervosa is an eating disorder not yet recognized by the DSM-IV, but some psychologists have recently suggested that it's time it was. They're seeing more and more patients suffering from 'an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.'"
• Macronutrients: William Prout's three principle constituents of food; protein, fat, carbohydrates
• Vitamines: circa 1912, "vita-" for life and "-amines" for organic compounds organized around nitrogen
• Nutritionism: "We should understand and engage with food and our bodies in terms of their nutritional and chemical constituents and requirements--the assumption being that this is all we need to understand"; "not the same thing as nutrition--it is not a scientific subject but an ideology (ideologies are ways organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions;" "Foods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts."
• Americanization (of food): "To make food choices more scientific is to empty them of their ethnic content and history."
• Zero-sum relationship: "If you eat a lot of one thing, you're probably not eating a lot of something else."
• Metabolic syndrome "syndrome x": "large amounts of refined carbohydrates in the diet combined with a sedentary lifestyle had disordered the intricate (and still imperfectly understood) system by which the insulin hormone regulates the metabolism of carbohydrates and fats in the body." "The diseases of civilization."
• Western diet: lots of processed foods, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything except fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.

Favorite Quotes

• "The chronic diseases that now kill most of us can be traced directly to the industrialization of our food: the rise of highly processed foods and refined grains; the use of chemicals to raise plants and animals in huge monocultures; the superabundance of cheap calories of sugar and fat produced by modern agriculture; and the narrowing of the biological diversity of the human diet to a tiny handful of staple crops, notably wheat, corn, and soy."
• "Nutritionism prefers to tinker with the Western diet, adjusting the various nutrients (lowering the fat, boosting the protein) and fortifying processed foods rather than questioning their value in the first place."
• "We are entering a postindustrial era of food; for the first time in a generation, it is possible to leave behind the Western diet without having also to leave behind civilization."
• Senator George McGovern: "Speak no more of foods, only nutrients."
• "When the emphasis is on quantifying the nutrients contained in foods any qualitative distinction between whole foods and processed foods is apt to disappear."
• "The typical whole food has much more trouble [than processed foods] competing under the rules of nutritionism."
• Rebuttal to the lipid hypothesis: "The amount of saturated fat in the diet may have little if any bearing on the risk of heart disease, and evidence that increasing polyunsaturated fats in the diet will reduce risk is slim to nil. As for the dangers of dietary cholesterol, the review found 'a weak and nonsignificant positive association between dietary cholesterol and risk of coronary heart disease.'"
• Why trans fat is bad: "'A higher intake of trans fat can contribute to increased risk of CHD through multiple mechanisms'; to wit, it raises bad cholesterol and lowers good cholesterol; it increases triglycerides, a risk factor for CHD; it promotes inflammation and possible thrombogenesis (clotting) and may promote insulin resistance." 
• American Medical Association: "There is a potential for harmful effects for a radical long-term dietary change as would occur through adoption of the proposed national goal [to advocate a diet low in fat and cholesterol]" 
• "Nutritionism might be the best thing ever to happen to the food industry...solves the problem of the fixed stomach (demand for food has in the past been fairly inelastic)."
• "Nutritionism tends to foster a great deal of anxiety around the experience of shopping for food and eating it."
• Harvey Levenstein: "The sheer abundance of food in America has bred 'a vague indifference to food, manifested in a tendency to eat and run, rather than to dine and savor.'"
• Harvey Levenstein on the American attitude towards food: "That taste is not a true guide to what should be eaten; that one should not simply eat what one enjoys; that the important components of food cannot be seen or tasted, but are discernible only in scientific laboratories; and that experimental science has produced rules of nutrition which will prevent illness and encourage longevity." 
• Marion Nestle: "The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science, 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."
• "That's the great thing about eating foods as compared with nutrients: You don't need to fathom a carrot's complexity in order to reap its benefits."
• "People who take supplements are healthier than the population at large, yet their health probably has nothing whatsoever to do with the supplements they take--most of which recent studies have suggested are worthless. Supplement takers tend to be better educated, more affluent people who, almost by definition, take a greater than usual interest in personal health--confounders that probably account for their superior health."
• "Far more powerful predictor of heart disease than either diet or exercise is social class."
• "The uncomfortable fact is that the entire field of nutritional science rests on a foundation of ignorance and lies about the most basic question of nutrition: What are people eating?"
• "I was beginning to realize just how much suspension of belief it takes to be a nutrition scientist."
• "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."
• "Native populations were eating a diet substantially higher in vitamins A and D than that of modern Americans...processing of foods typically robs them of nutrients, vitamins especially...calories are much easier to transport...than nutrients which are liable to deteriorate or attract the attention of bacteria, insects, and rodents...modern civilization had sacrificed much of the quality of its food in the interests of quantity and shelf life."
• Sir Albert Howard: "The industrialization of agriculture would eventually take its toll on our health."
• Weston Price: "We were breaking the rules of nature at least twice: by robbing nutrients from the soils the foods had been grown in and then squandering those nutrients by processing the foods."
• "By breaking the links among local soils, local foods and local peoples, the industrial food system disrupted the circular flow of nutrients through the food chain." 
• "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."
• "Reductionism as a way of understanding food or drugs may be harmless, even necessary, but reductionism in practice--reducing food or drug plants to their most salient chemical compounds--can lead to problems."

"-Isms"

• "The best ethical and environmental choices also happen to be the best choices for our health."
• "'Overnutrition' is emerging as a more serious threat to public health than undernutrition."
• Western diet --> Western diseases = obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases
• "Most of the damage to our food and health caused by the industrialization of our eating can be reversed."
• Most of what we need to know about how to eat we already know."
• Dietary Goals (idiotic) contributor: "The question to be asked is not why we should change our diet, but why not?"
• 1977: the year our diets went from being led by culture to being led by the FDA
• "If a product is healthy by design and official sanction, then eating lots of it must be healthy too."
• "Scientists study what scientists can see."
• "Common denominator of good health...was to eat a traditional diet consisting of fresh foods from animals and plants grown on soils that were themselves rich in nutrients."
• "I'll feed you if you spread around my genes."
• "Our personal health cannot be divorced from the health of the entire food web."
• "Ecological relationships are between eaters and whole foods, not nutrients or chemicals."
• "Contrary to the nutrition label, not all carbohydrates are created equal."
• "To escape the Western diet and the ideology of nutritionism, we have only to stop eating and thinking that way."
• "Simply avoid any food that has been processed to such an extent that it is more the product of industry than of nature."

Food Rules

• "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

1. Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.
• Don't eat anything incapable of rotting.
2. Avoid food products containing ingredients that are A) unfamiliar, B) unpronounceable, C) more than five in number, or that include D) high-fructose corn syrup.
3. Avoid food products that make health claims.
4. Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.
5. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible.
• As for supermarket organic produce, it too is likely to have come from far away--from the organic farms of California or, increasingly, China.
• A wall of ignorance intervenes between consumers and producers, and that wall fosters a certain carelessness on both sides.
• Shake the hand that feeds you.
• Our food dollars can either go to support a food industry devoted to quantity and convenience and "value" or they can nourish a food chain organized around values--values like quality and health. 

1. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.
• Antioxidants like vitamin C harmlessly absorb and stabilize [free] radicals before they can do their mischief.
• [They] do something else for us as well. They stimulate the liver to produce the enzymes necessary to break down the antioxidant itself, enzymes that, once produced, go on to break down other compounds as well, including whatever toxins happen to resemble the antioxidant. In this way, antioxidants help detoxify dangerous chemicals, including carcinogens, and the ore kinds of antioxidants in the diet, the more kinds of toxins the body can disarm. This is one reason why it's important to eat as many different kinds of plants as possible. They all have different antioxidants and so help the body eliminate different kinds of toxins. (It stands to reason the more toxins there are in the environment, the more plants you should be eating.
• Natural selection tends to dispense with anything superfluous that is metabolically expensive to produce. 
• We know that vegetarians are less susceptible to most of the Western diseases, and as a consequence live longer than the rest of us. (Though near vegetarians--so called flexitarians--are just as healthy as vegetarians.)
• Unlike plants, which we can't live without, we don't need to eat meat--with the exception of vitamin B12, every nutrient found in meat can be obtained somewhere else. 
• Eating too much industrial meat exposes us to more saturated fat, omega-6 fatty acids, growth hormone and carcinogens than we probably want in our diet. 
2. You are what what you eat eats too. 
• A diet of grass means much healthier fats (more omega-3s, linoleic acid, or CLA; fewer omega-6s and saturated fat) in their meat, milk and eggas, as well as appreciably higher levels of vitamins and antioxidants.
3. If you have the space, buy a freezer.
4. Eat like an omnivore.
• The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases.
5. Eat well-grown food from healthy soils
• Appreciably higher levels of antioxidants, flavonoids, vitamins and other nutrients in several of the organic crops...look for food that is both organic and local. 
6. Eat wild foods when you can.
• Wild game generally has less saturated fat and more omega-3 fatty acids than domesticated animals
7. Be the kind of person who takes supplements.
8. Eat more like the French or the Italians or the Japanese or the Indians or the Greeks
• Biocultural: eating is deeply rooted in nature--in human biology on one side and in the natural world on the other. The specific combinations of foods in a cuisine and the ways they are prepared constitute a deep reservoir of accumulated wisdom about diet and health and place.
• The soybean itself is a notably inauspicious stable food; it contains a whole assortment of "anti nutrients"--compounds that actually block the body's absorption of vitamins and minerals, interfere with the hormonal system, and prevent the body from breaking down the proteins in the soy itself.
9. Regard nontraditional foods with skepticism.
10. Don't look for the magic bullet in the traditional diet.
• The inability to pin down the key nutrient matters much more to the scientist (and the food industry) than it does to us "free-living" eaters in the real world.
11. Have a glass of wine with dinner.
• People who drink moderately and regularly live longer and suffer considerably less heart disease than teetotalers. 

1. Pay more, eat less.
• Calorie restriction has repeatedly been shown to slow aging and prolong lifespan in animals, and some researchers believe it is the strongest link between a change in the diet and the prevention of cancer. Overeating promotes cell division and promotes it most dramatically in cancer cells; cutting down on calories slows cell division. It also stifles the production of free radicals, curbs inflammation and reduces the risk of most of the Western diseases.
• The people of Okinawa, one of the longest-lived and healthiest populations in the world, practice a principle they call hara hachi bu: eat until you are 80 percent full.
• Spending more for better food is less a matter of ability than priority. We spend a smaller percentage of our income on food than any other industrialized society...the portion spent on food has declined, spending on health care has soared. 
2. Eat meals.
3. Do all your eating at a table.
4. Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does.
5. Try not to eat alone.
6. Consult your gut. 
• Serve smaller portions on smaller plates.
• Leave detritus on the table. 
• Use glasses that are more vertical than horizontal.
• Leave healthy foods in view, unhealthy ones out of view.
• Leave serving bowls in the kitchen rather than on the table to discourage second helpings. 
7. Eat slowly. 
• To eat slowly, in the Slow Food sense, is to eat with a fuller knowledge of all that is involved in bringing food out of the earth and to the table. 
• Wendell Berry: "Eating with the fullest pleasure--pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance--is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend."
• Cook and, if you can, plant a garden. 

Changes brought by the Modern diet:

• From whole foods to refined
• Shift toward increasingly refined foods: prestige, extends shelf life, easier to digest.
• A great deal of modern industrial food can be seen as an extension and intensification of this practice as food processors find ways to deliver glucose ever more swiftly and efficiently.
• Refined flour is the first fast food.
• "This analysis suggests that something else in the whole grain protects against death." 
• "A whole food might be more than the sum of its nutrient parts."
• Sugar as it is ordinarily found in nature gives us a slow release form of energy accompanied by minerals and all sorts of crucial micronutrients we can get nowhere else.
• From complexity to simplicity
• Chemically simplified soil would produce chemically simplified plants.
• "Destroying complexity is a lot easier than creating it."
• The actual number of species in the modern diet is shrinking.
• From quality to quantity
• USDA figures show a decline in the nutrient content of the forty-three crops it has tracked since the 1950s
• "The result is the nutritional equivalent of inflation, such that we have to eat more to get the same amounts of various essential nutrients." Caused by "changes in the way we grow food and changes in the kinds of foods we grow."
• "When you breed for one thing, you invariably sacrifice another."
• "You don't need to spend much time in an American supermarket to figure out that this is a food system organized around the objective of selling large quantities of calories as cheaply as possible."
• "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."
• Bruce Ames: "Our high calorie, low nutrient diet is responsible for many chronic diseases, including cancer...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.
• From leaves to seeds
• Omega-3s appear to play an important role in neurological development and processing. visual acuity, and the calming of inflammation; spoil more readily; increase permeability of cell's membrane and its rate of metabolism; strong correlation between falling omega-3s and rising rates of depression, suicide and homicide...attention deficit disorder as well.
• Omega-6s are involved in fat storage, the rigidity of cell walls, clotting and the inflammation response. 
• Historically low levels of omega-3s bear responsibility for many of the chronic diseases associated with the Western diet, including heart disease and diabetes. 
• The Japanese, who consume large amounts of omega-3s, have markedly low rates of cardiovascular disease in spite of their high rates of smoking and high blood pressure.
• Inflammation is now believed to play an important role in cardiovascular disease as well as in a range of other disorders, including rheumatoid arthritis and Alzheimer's.
• Merely adding omega-3s to the diet may not do much good unless we also reduce the high levels of omega-6s that have entered the Western diet with the advent of processed foods, seed oils, and foods from animals raised on grain.
• The root of all these biochemical changes is a single ecological change. The shift from leaves to seeds affects more than the levels of omega-3s and omega-6 in the body. It also helps account for the flood of refined carbohydrates in the modern diet and the drought of so many micronutrients and the surfeit of total calories. 
• From food culture to food science
• The Western diet is systematically and deliberately undermining traditional food cultures everywhere.
• Relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat.
• Apparently it is much easier, or at least a lot more profitable, to change a disease of civilization into a lifestyle than it is to change the way that civilization eats.

Corrupted

• American Heart Association their crime is hypocrisy. They administer non-healthful foods their seal of approval (to companies willing to pay a "small" fee), deceiving millions into buying products detrimental to health, while shamelessly declaring that health is their sole interest. 
• US Government their crime is abuse of power. They promote monoculture, put the interests of big corporations before those of its constituents, push quantity over quality, and enact idiotic dietary guidelines
• Food and Drug Association their crime is cowardice. They continually cave to lobbyists, allow ambiguity in packaging, conceal the truths behind the industrial food industry, corrupt the meaning of "organic"
• The Food Industry their crime is deception. Their clever marketing is aimed at exploiting the ignorance of the public and exacerbating nutritionalism, which continually seeks to slaughter the innocence of good, whole foods. The over processed products they put out is literally killing us. 
• John Harvey Kellogg and Horace Fletcher: fathers of food faddism; Battle Creek sanitarium (hourly yogurt enemas, electrical stimulation and 'massive vibration,' nothing but grapes), "Fletcherizing"

Of all the guidelines Pollan set forth in this book, the one I anticipate having the most trouble following is "Not too much." I've spent a lot of time eating only when my stomach would start growling. It's a lot harder than you'd think to eat on a schedule. First of all, I'm not a morning person at all, so it makes it hard to wake up and prepare breakfast. I'm not confident in my ability to prepare food, in general, so it's hard for me to make food even the night before. Secondly, I'm usually always on the go and my schedule can be unpredictable, so it's hard to set aside time to eat meals. When I do eat meals, they're usually when I can't take it any longer. By that point, I'm grouchy and still in a hurry. I wolf down my food and sometimes eat seconds before I realize I'm full (it takes 20 minutes for signals of satiety to reach your brain). The end result is less meals per day than is recommended and more food consumed at each meal. 

I think what that tells me is that I need to stop making excuses for my eating habits. It's hard, as Pollan admits, to live as an American but ignore the American diet. I have less problem rejecting bad food than I do being completely diligent in preparing meals and eating on time. It's not like I go to convenience stores to buy pre-packaged food, but I eat at chain restaurants like California Pizza Kitchen and Macaroni Grill too often (the danger with eating at those places is, of course, hidden sodium and fat that you'd be able to avoid if you made those dishes yourself). If I could start cooking more often--even once a week would be helpful--I'd feel a lot more confident in my diet and health. 

Hey! How convenient. The next Pollan book I'll be reading is Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. Hehe.

Rating: 5/5 stars