Book Review - In Defense of Food
The Science of Nutitionism Has Forgotten We Eat Food Not Nutrients
Like the little boy in Emperor’s New Clothes, Michael Pollan has declared that we aren’t wearing any clothes with his newest book, In Defense of Food. He has pointed out that the reason human beings are so overweight and undernourished is that the phenomenon of “nutritionism” is keeping us from eating food.
The fundamental problems with the American diet began, Pollan says, when nutritionists and food scientists began to isolate the health components of food rather than the whole food product. In other words, it’s the beta-carotenes, not the carrots, that are healthy. Pollan calls this “scientific reductionism” being applied to food.
With each reduction of a food item into its component parts, Americans are inundated with information on how to achieve better health by getting more of the nutrient currently being touted. The problem with this, Pollan says, is that “people don’t eat nutrients; they eat foods and foods can behave very differently from the nutrients they contain.” We have become a nation obsessed with getting the latest information on the nutrients in our diets, buying whatever is on the grocery shelves provided it claims to be healthy. Low fat, low carb, high fiber and low cholesterol are now the buzzwords we search for. Pollan, however, thinks there is a much simpler way to be healthy.
Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants
The need to say “Eat Food” exposes a fundamental flaw in the science of nutritionism. The packaged items at most supermarkets today are less about food and more about nutrients. Americans have gotten so used to seeing non-food on the shelves that we’ve come to believe it’s actually food. But that’s not all.
“Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” When more people farmed and farmer’s sold their product directly to the consumer, it was easier to recognize food. Yogurt was just “milk inoculated with a bacterial culture…” He argues that products like Go-Gurt Portable Yogurt are not food. In fact, they probably shouldn’t even be considered edible.
Avoid Foods that Make Health Claims
“For a food product to make health claims on its package it must first have a package, so right off the bat it’s more likely to be a processed than a whole food.” Nutritionism has so infiltrated the market that the factory food product is actually being touted as being “healthier than the traditional food it replaced.” In addition, the food factories are claiming that eating chips, fries, hotdogs, etc are perfectly healthy as long as we eat the version that is low in fat and cholesterol, or whatever the industry is currently claiming is beneficial to human health.
Human beings, especially in western countries, have forgotten that food used to consist of fruits, vegetables, grains, meats and dairy. Instead, we have come to think that we should eat vitamins, minerals, fiber, protein and calcium. And while food contains these items it is not the nutrients that make food what it is. A whole food is not the sum of its nutrient parts.
Within In Defense of Food, Pollan not only describes the reasons why nutritionism has failed the American public and made us less healthy than before, but he also tells us how to step away from the current thinking on nutrition and back to the way our ancestors thought, when eating food was the norm.
What do you think about this article?
More in Health & Wellness
Latest Articles