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Eat food, says Michael Pollan. Real food, not imitation food. Not foodlike creations of food science. Not disembodied nutrients. Eat whole food, if you can find it, because it is more than the sum of its parts. This is good advice.
He discusses the economic and political angles of the food processing and marketing industries, and asks, "When will the doctors kick the fast-food franchises out of the hospitals?" Powerful lobbies in Washington influence food "science," which is ideology anyway, not real science. Beware of the Nutritional Industrial Complex! The Western diet is a disaster because real food is disappearing from supermarket shelves and being replaced by chemical concoctions "elaborately festooned with health claims."
If the latest food science really knows better than Mother Nature, why don't babies thrive on infant formulas? Why does margarine cause more health problems than butter? Why does nutritional equivalence never seem to work? He discusses dietary fats, which might not be as bad as claimed by the lipid hypothesis. Fat is not a toxin, he says; don't be afraid of the fats in real food.
Most of this book is not new. You don't need to read it if you are already knowledgeable about food. But it makes sense. Read it if you are confused about what to eat, or if you are concerned about the degradation of the American food supply. Read it if you are overweight and don't know why.
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This book should be required reading for all Americans. A must read if you are interested in organic/local food, etc.
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This little book, In Defense of Food, is probably better journalism but worse literature than the author's previous The Omnivore's Dilemma. An attempt to summarize our current lack of knowledge about nutrition and health and provide a skeptics' "best hunch" approach to eating, the book provides a brief critique of the "nutritional" approach to food, including critiques of the lipid and carbohydrate hypotheses, and suggests a strategy of turning back to time-tested forms of food consumption like traditional cuisines.
Compared with The Omnivore's Dilemma, this book is less sensationalistic and seems to be on firmer footing with regard to the empirical issues it addresses. However, as in The Omnivore's Dilemma, the author's social class and personal biases seep into the recommendations. So, for example, we know from The Omnivore's Dilemma that the author has flirted with vegetarianism, believing it to be a morally superior way of living but unable to square it with his culinary desires. In the current book, he tells us that he can't find a compelling reason to avoid meat for health reasons (obviously he was looking for one), although he immediately qualifies that statement by saying there are good ethical and enviromental reasons for doing so. But his recommendation to keep meat to a minimum comes in the context of one of his main case studies in favor of traditional diet--an experiment in which Australian aborigines reversed disease processes by going back to the bush. He lists their diet as birds, kangaroo, grubs, larvae, fish, shellfish, turtle, crocodile, yams, figs, and honey--a fairly high meat-to-plant ratio.
This apparent contradiction between primarily-plant and aboriginal diets points to the biggest bias problem in the book, which is the author's typically leftist anti-self bias. Throughout In Defense of Food, the villain is "the Western diet," although the author commends French, Greek, and Italian cuisines, which are unquestionably "Western." That the author makes spurious comments about traditional Jewish cuisine when orthodox Jews have some of the longest life expectancies is also curious. So, for example, he recommends looking for food our Neolithic ancestors would have recognized, although the archaeological record shows that the transition from Paleolithic life (like that of the Australian aborigines) to Neolithic (the introduction of farming) coincided with worse health and shorter life-spans. However, recommending a Paleolithic diet wouldn't square with any culinary desires for artisanal bread or fit in with the author's California-university-professor social niche.
The plant/Neolithic bias also leads him to unfairly criticize Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories, suggesting that Taubes is recommending a nutritional approach to eating that has as little merit as the lipid hypothesis that Taubes criticizes. In fact, Taubes is a science journalist whose point is more about the failure of the science community to approach low-carb and low-fat diets with proper rigor and the medical community's propensity for approaching obesity as a moral/social failure rather than a physiological/hormonal issue.
Despite my reservations, I would definitely recommend In Defense of Food. The author's approach to nutrition, which is a post-modern combination of healthy skepticism with pseudo-traditionalism both appeals to my own sensibilities and, as far as I can tell, makes the best of current nutritional science. For those not already immersed in the issues the author addresses like "seeds vs. leaves," this is a quick and worthwhile read.
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Great read. Plenty of information, unfortunately I find this to be shameful pandering of a book. Pollan spends quite a while talking about the inabilities of the nutritional industry to accurately tell which nutrients are good for a variety of reasons, says there experiments are inconclusive and inaccurate. He then goes on to use these same types of studies to support his what he says is missing from out diet since we aren't eating "food" anymore. I personally find the assumption that I wouldn't notice the hypocrisy to be offensive. It detracts from his entire point.
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Amazing book that everyone needs to read, doesn't matter what your view is on food and agriculture you will find something relevant to you and your health in this book!
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