In Defense Of Food
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
We’re not eating food anymore. We’re Orthorexics, people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating. And now that the ideology of “Nutritionism” has its cold, clammy hands firmly throttling our very throats and controlling what we mindlessly shovel into our mouths, food has been distilled into a convoluted linguistic labyrinth of nutrients, macro-nutrients, micro-nutrients, vitamins, minerals, protein, fat, carbohydrates, saturated fat, antioxidants, polyunsaturated fat, cholesterol, fiber, amino acids, etc, etc, et al. Good Grief!
Though Pollan does a very good job of taking the reader through nutritionism’s never-ending oscillations of advice (fat is evil, cholesterol is evil, carbs are evil), one specific fact illuminates all we need to know: “30 years of nutritional advice have left us fatter, sicker, and more poorly nourished.” Something must change. And Pollan does humbly offer a few suggestions.
A quarter of all Americans suffer from metabolic syndrome.
Two thirds of us are overweight or obese.
Diet-related diseases are already killing the majority of us.
“Much more so than the human body, capitalism is marvelously adaptive, able to turn the problems it creates into new business opportunities: diet pills, heart bypass operations, insulin pumps, bariatric surgery.” Hooray, Capitalism!
Even our modern dental maladies (braces, root canals, extractions of wisdom teeth, cavities, and routine cleanings and procedures) may be the result of poor diet and nutrition. A public debate between hygiene and nutrition was waged in the 1930s. Hygiene ultimately carried the day, hygiene being easier and far more profitable for the dental profession than restructuring the entire food system.
We are overfed and undernourished. USDA figures show a decline in the nutrient content of the forty-three crops it has tracked since the 1950s. The Food Industry releases 17,000 new food products every year and spends $32 billion a year marketing them. There are boxed breakfast cereals with bright labels proudly claiming their health benefits while fruits and vegetables in the produce section have no such marks. Pollan advises to be wary of any product that has to advertise its health benefits. Pollan eloquently and intelligently provides some rationale to this sick world of contemporary food consumption that is a nefarious web of collusion with straightforward advice:
“A whole food might be more than the sum of its nutrient parts.”
