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Animal Snow Instinctively What's Good for Them and What's Not? Why are humans the only animals that need help when deciding what to eat? There's so much baffling advice and opinion available on the subject of healthy eating that we're left feeling anxious and confused.
New York Times writer Michael Pollan thinks we do need help, but not from nutritionists. Pollan's 2006 bestseller, the Omnivores dilemma, a natural history of four meals, was a critique of the highly industrialized food chain that supplies most people's food in the US and Western Europe. In defensive food was his way of answering his reader's most frequent question. If we are told that so many things are not good for us, what should we eat? The book, subtitled, and Edor's Manifesto has been a big influence in the so-called Foodie movement since its initial publication in 2008.
Its focus on where food comes from has helped fuel the growth of farmer's markets and artisan food suppliers, and the book became the basis of a PBS documentary. Pollan offers persuasive and eloquent advice on how to plot our escape from the typical Western diet. Even more importantly, his Manifesto aims to restore food to its rightful place as a source of health and happiness. Food is not simply fuel, it is a source of love, life, and culture.
Let's now go into the book in more depth, focusing on three key themes. First, the rise of nutrition as opposed to eating. Second, the Western diet and why it is making us so ill. And third, Pollan's axioms for eating and living well.
Let's start with how nutritionism began. In 1977, a U.S. government select committee published the first set of guidelines about how ordinary people should eat. Crucially, these shifted the blame from foodstuffs, such as meat and dairy, to individual nutrients such as saturated fat. Initially, the guidelines had simply recommended eating less meat and fewer dairy products.
But the food industry lobbied government for a rephrasing. People were now told not to eat less meat and dairy, but to eat in a way that reduced their saturated fat intake. This immediately made the advice more difficult to follow, and meant that people were dependent on nutritionists to tell them how much saturated fat different foods contained. This also led to an even bigger detriment.
Here is Pollan speaking at an RSA event. A lot of our problem around food traces to the ideology we bring when we walk through a supermarket or navigate a restaurant menu. The label I use for that ideology is nutritionism. Pollan is careful to distinguish between the science of nutrition and what he calls nutritionism. That is an ideology that is arisen among scientists, food marketers, and even governments. It says that it's not food itself that matters, but the individual nutrients it contains, and we need experts to tell us about them. The sole purpose of eating is to maintain health and avoid disease.
The result is that over the last few decades, the old sources of wisdom about what to eat, traditional food cultures, usually embodied by our mothers and grandmothers, have been replaced by official advice and guidelines. These are often influenced by food manufacturers whose priorities are not our good health. The story of Marjorin shows how bad for our health this way of thinking can be.
Made from hydrogenated vegetable oils, Marjorin was invented as a cheap substitute for butter. It was marketed as a healthier alternative because the fats it contained were polyunsaturated rather than saturated. The only problem is, more and more studies were showing a negative link between the consumption of trans fats found in some marjorins and heart disease. It now seems likely that Marjorin, at least in its earliest formulations, was more harmful to our health than butter. Public health bodies, pollen, observes, are still reluctant to admit this mistake.
Many studies have called into question the low fat orthodoxy that has held sway for many decades, partly because of what the fat is tended to be replaced with. Sugar. The campaign against fats, as pollen, is nutritionism's central failure. The advice to switch to low fat foods encouraged people to eat more processed foods, which sometimes turned out to be harmful. During the 1980s and 90s, food labels got longer and longer.
Any perceived nutritional deficiencies in foodstuffs could be compensated for by additives. Eggs could have their omega-3 fatty acids thanks to chickens being fed flax seeds, and a wave of trendy foods were championed for their superior nutritional qualities. Superfoods. Today's examples include pomegranates and quinoa. We're born.
Processed food manufacturers got fully on board with this. The Mars Corporation even founded a chair in chocolate science at the University of California. Processed foods with alluring health claims proliferated. It turns out that nutritionism was about the best thing that could have happened to the food industry.
But the most grievous charge that pollen charges nutritionism with is this. The emphasis on nutrients and eating purely for health creates an error of disapproval of eating for pleasure. Here is pollen describing that disassociation in the RSA talk. The whole point of eating is about health. That when we eat this activity takes place on a spectrum that ranges from destroying your health on one end to redeeming your health on the other. Not only has it made us less healthy, nutritionism has taken away one of the great pleasures of life. Eating. It is even led to a new form of illness, orthorexia nervosa, or an obsession with eating foods one believes to be healthy.
The modern politician likes to capitalize on this, promoting themselves as the common man. Think of Trump's fried chicken takeaways on Air Force One. Bill Clinton's much advertised love of Big Macs, or how every campaigning British leader is seen having to eat. The next leader is seen having a pint at a local pub. The politicians are onto something. Making food choices purely based on nutrition, omitting its pleasurable elements, robs food of its cultural background and history. What we eat is who we are.
Nutritionism wouldn't be so bad if nutritional science was beyond reproach, but it's not. It's hard to design good quality studies because multiple compounds are present in every food stuff. These are affected by being cooked in different ways, eaten in combination with different things, and then digested by bodies that process food differently. There are the confounding factors of lifestyle and activity levels, and a dependence on people to report their food consumption accurately, which we're notoriously poor at doing. Pollons conclusion? Science is a questionable tool for deciding what to eat.
We'll wrap up for now, but let's first recap what we've learned today. We're covering, in-defensive food, Michael Pollons follow up to his bestseller, the Omnivores Dilemma. We've gone over the start of nutritionism, a populist movement that favored trendy diets and eating habits over realistic behavior.
When we return, we'll cover why Western diets make us sick. Enjoying this episode of Book Insights? If so, people listening and learning. There's a collection of over 100 titles you can read or listen to now at memodeapp.com slash insights. That's m-e-m-o-d-a-p-p.com slash insights.
We're continuing our exploration into Michael Pollons' book on the way we eat. It's called In-defensive Food, an Eater's Manifesto. Previously, we've covered the Historical Foundation of Nutritionism, a term Pollon made up to identify the favoring of trends, bad diets, and misinformation. Now we're going to go further in depth with the effects of nutritionism. We'll look at how Western diets are failing us.
Pollon finds the earliest contributor to bad Western diets his agriculture. Here is Pollon explaining this to Bill Mar on real time. Then we invented agriculture, which by the way, at the beginning made us really sick. Radical change in the diet, we went for meeting a great diversity of plants and animals, who eating lots of grain, and narrowing our diet down to just a few different substances.
Pollon cites a 1982 study of 10 Aboriginal men who had suffered badly from type 2 diabetes since adopting a store-based Western diet. Closely observed by researchers, the men went back to their previous diet, which was based solely on foraging and hunting. Their health showed a striking improvement within weeks. Although effects like this are more pronounced in people who suddenly adopt a Western-style diet, type 2 diabetes has risen 5% annually in the US population since 1990, and 25% of all Americans suffer from metabolic syndrome, a precursor to diabetes.
Researchers in the early 20th century were the first to observe the lack of diseases like heart disease, cancer, and diabetes in the native populations of Africa, India, Asia, and many other places.
Pollon recalls the work of Western Price, a dentist who, wondering why Westerners needed so much dental work, published pioneering findings in 1935 that demonstrated the importance of good quality soil and the disease-protecting effects of traditional diets. He found no single ideal diet among the many he studied. Some were plant-based, some exclusively meat and dairy, but the common denominator was a non-Western diet of fresh foods from animals and plants reared on nutrient-rich soil.
Other critiques of industrialized agriculture soon followed, highlighting how the links between local food, local soil, and local peoples were broken. Our personal health cannot be divorced from the health of the entire food web, Pollon observes.
Traditional diets are based on interconnected food chains that depend on gradual adaptation, on knowledge of how food is produced, on the ability to use our senses to determine ripeness, and on knowing how to combine different foods through trial and error. They are also based on foods that are whole and unprocessed.
The recent changes in our eating have happened so rapidly that our bodies haven't had the chance to adapt. Pollon lists five key problems with the Western diet. First, a move from whole foods to refined or processed foods, starting with the first refined white wheat flowers during the industrial revolution. Refining removes many of the nutrients from wheat grains, but extends their shelf life.
Second, a move from complexity to simplicity. Our soils are now mostly fertilized with a simple mixture of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, which ignores the immense biological diversity needed to develop a full range of nutrients and plants. The same trend is seen in the much narrower range of plant species grown, and therefore consumed by us. Four species, corn, soy, wheat, and rice now make up two-thirds of the entire calorie content of the Western diet.
Third, a move from quality to quantity. In the quest to reduce food prices, agricultural yields are prioritized above all else, which means a reduction in nutritional content. We now have to eat more to gain the same nutritional benefit, a concept known as nutritional inflation.
A fourth problem with the Western diet is a shift from leaves to seeds. Grain like soy and wheat, on which we rely heavily, are the most efficient converters of soil nutrients and sunlight into energy. Leaves provide other critical nutrients, especially amino acids that the body can't synthesize, like the much-fetted omega-3 fatty acids. In fact, we can live without seeds, whose energy we can find from other sources, but not without leaves.
Pauline discusses at length the fatty acid debate, which has received much press attention in recent years. Omega-3s, found in leaves, are the heroes, while omega-6s, found in grains, are the villains. The beneficial effects of the omega-3s have been found in so many places, from improved eyesight to homicide prevention, that he likenes the zeal of omega-3 researchers to Dr. Kassabin's single-minded devotion to his key to all mythologies in middle-march.
The fifth problem of the Western diet is a move from food culture to food science. Nutritionism has been co-opted to help sell more than 17,000 new food products each year. Even the healthcare industry, in the US at least, stands to benefit from the increase in Western diseases, as it develops more and more ways to cope with the rise in chronic diseases. Here is Michael Moss pointing out what he sees in the supermarket to Pauline for the New York Times. It seems like such a tranquil atmosphere here, quiet, peaceful music, smells okay, but behind these shelves is the most fiercely competitive industry there is. Capitalism is more adaptive than the human body, Pauline Riley observes.
Nutritionism has left us with diets and a surfeit of calories, and way too much fat, sugar, and refined carbohydrates. The Western diet encourages unnecessarily large portions, a reliance on processed and fast food, a steep drop in cooking at home, and a marked increase in eating in places other than a dining table. Rising obesity rates and deaths from diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers all have demonstrable links to diet and have been termed the Western diseases.
Let's wrap up for now. We're covering Michael Pauline's indefensive food. This time we've gone over how Western diets take away the nutrients our bodies need. Commercial interests and misinformation have us lost in our health standards. We'll conclude next time with how to fix our broken understanding of food.
Enjoying this episode of Book Insights? If so, keep listening and learning. There's a collection of over 100 titles you can read or listen to now at memodeapp.com slash insights. That's M-E-M-O-D-A-P-P.com slash insights.
We're concluding our look into indefensive food. It's Michael Pauline's follow-up to his bestseller, The Omnivores Dilemma. Previously, we've gone over nutritionism, an ideology that put nutrients before food itself. Then we went over how this affects us and the five reasons why Western diets are failing.
As we've learned so far, food isn't just about supplying yourself with nutrients. Eating is something more. Here is Pauline in his RSA talk. People have eaten for a great many other equally legitimate reasons. Let's see if we can remember a few of them. Pleasure. Remember that?
Now, we'll look at the recipe for a long, healthy life. In the final section of the book, Pauline sets out his advice for how we can escape the malign influence of nutritionism and the Western diet. Here's Pauline laying out his plan for PBS. Well, there's another option. We can take the more practical, the more economical, and the more beautiful path, which is simply to change the way we're eating. He's not interested in telling us what to have for dinner tonight, but instead offers guiding principles to keep in mind when shopping, cooking, and eating.
We cannot rely on scientific studies for the solution. We must turn instead to more ancient eating wisdom. Is it possible to do this without adopting the diets of our ancestors, which hold little appeal for most of us? He tries to make his advice as simple as possible. Pauline makes perhaps the most famous statement of the book. Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. In other words, exclude anything that would baffle her in the supermarket aisle.
Eat food, not Frankenstein food that's been invented in a lab or is the end result of a marketing team's idea. Next up, avoid food products that list ingredients which are unfamiliar, unpronounceable, more than five in number, or include high fructose corn syrup. Even if not always bad in themselves, these things tend to indicate a high level of processing. Link to this is avoid food products that make health claims. The mere presence of a package indicates processing, and whole foods don't often have well-funded marketing campaigns behind them.
The U.S. Food Regulation Body, the FDA, comes under fire from Pauline here because of the invention of qualified health claims. In 2002, presumably under pressure from food manufacturers, it authorized a new type of health claim accompanied by a disclaimer that the FDA concludes there is little evidence supporting this claim, which can be displayed in any way the manufacturer sees fit. Not surprisingly, this usually means very small print.
Another of Pauline's principles is shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle. This is because fresh, whole produce is usually displayed around the edges. Preferably, get out of the supermarket whenever possible. Here are Pauline and food writer Michael Moss navigating a typical supermarket for the New York Times. Look at the sweep of this kind of real estate territory. This is a cliff of sugar, bit. Dying large, right? Yeah, with little passes in between where you can try to sort of navigate yourself to get to the more whole foods.
The shorter the food chain, the better, because small farms tend to plant more diverse crops and have better quality soil. Food reclaims its story and some of its nobility when the person who grew it, hands it to you. Pauline says. Next, the book's simplest and perhaps best advice. Eat food, mostly plants, not too much. Nearly every study concludes that eating more vegetables and whole grains makes us healthier. He is not against eating a small amount of meat because it is still nutritionally beneficial, even if not essential. Eating less than a portion per day doesn't seem to come with any health risks.
The diet of animals that you eat matters as much as your own. You are what they eat. Grass-fed animal products are much better than grain-fed ones because leaves are better for them and us. The health of soil is incredibly important in Pauline's view. Organic soil is good, but some food without an organic label is grown in good soil, and organic doesn't automatically mean healthy or unprocessed. We should eat wild rather than farm-grown foods wherever possible. These have developed more antioxidants and other beneficial micronutrients in order to defend themselves from pests and disease.
Next, a slightly oddball piece of advice. Be the kind of person who takes supplements. Although nutritional supplements themselves don't seem to work, people who take them are healthier, probably because they lead healthier lifestyles and look after themselves.
Interestingly, Pauline notes that since natural selection is less interested in life preservation once we are past child-bearing age, our bodies are less good at absorbing antioxidants as we age, even though we need them more. So it might be a good idea for the over 50s to take a multivitamin.
Pauline also advises to eat more like the French, Italians, Japanese, Indians or Greeks. What he means is that it is good to follow any traditional diet, even if that diet includes foods usually thought of as unhealthy.
The so-called French paradox is that the French are generally healthier despite consuming a lot of wine and meat. Such diets represent Pauline says, a deep reservoir of accumulated wisdom about diet and health and place, including knowledge of foods that ward off disease. Though good eating is all about dietary patterns and food culture, not individual-star ingredients.
Pauline suggests that we have a glass of wine with dinner as small amounts of alcohol seem to reduce the risk of heart disease.
Pauline建议我们在晚餐时喝一杯葡萄酒,因为少量的酒精似乎可以降低患心脏病的风险。
Finally, Pauline addresses questions of food habits and culture. By this he means how people eat, not just what they eat. Pay more and eat less is a good rule of thumb. The growth of fast and convenience food has meant that we no longer pay attention or get full enjoyment from our food.
Pauline acknowledges that a lot of people can't afford to pay more for food, but many of us can. Eat meals, he says. Avoid stacking and spend more time eating with other people. Many important and good things happen around a dining table, as well as just eating. Sharing the same food is important too, so that portion sizes are dictated by the person serving rather than by a food manufacturer, and we tend to eat a lot slower.
Another rule of thumb is, do all your eating at a table and don't eat alone. As well as all the other benefits, communal meals often place natural limits on consumption. It's much easier to overeat when you're doing something else at the same time as eating. Pauline even recommends introducing a ritual, such as saying grace before meals, to help us slow down and pay attention to what we are about to do.
The final advice in the book is to cook, and if you can, plant a garden. Aside from the health benefits, cooking is the best way to escape the whole culture of fast food and quick eating. When we cook, the traditional culture of the kitchen takes over and we stop worrying about nutrients. We also reclaim control over our food from experts and manufacturers, because we can add whatever we like. A cook may have a great many things to worry about, but health isn't one of them. Just making a meal from scratch is inherently healthy, compared to buying pre-made food and sticking it in the oven.
Michael Pauline wrote, indefensive food over a decade ago. But what if anything has changed since then? Some of his predictions, such as the anti-sugar movement, have certainly come true. Many of the problems with nutritionism are still evident today.
Governments still regularly issue dietary advice and recommend low-fat alternatives, such as margarine or zero-fat yogurt. Our food anxieties don't seem to be diminishing. The recent trend for so-called clean eating cookbooks and wellness bloggers, whose site aspects of nutritional science, has swelled the ranks of people keen to advise us about how we should be eating. The bogeymen these days are usually gluten or sugar.
The significant rise in people adopting vegetarian and vegan diets indicates that many of us are moving towards a plant-based diet. But many observers have also noticed a widening food gap between those who can afford to eat well and those who can't. This is an issue that some commentators have accused Pauline of dodging.
What we really have him to thank for is releasing us from dietary anxiety, giving us the confidence to make our own decisions and experience the full pleasures of eating and reminding us that we are part of nature and connected to food cultures going back hundreds of years.
Before we conclude our discussion on indefensive food, let's go over everything we've explored. We've learned that our understanding of health has been corrupted by nutritionism, a misconception of nutrition over food. Then we looked at the history behind our food losing its healthiness.
Finally, we've gone over Pauline's well-researched and extensive list of do's and don'ts regarding getting back to the food and eating that counts. We'll end with advice from 18th century French gastronome Jean-Enthaim Brieette Severon. He's had a delicious triple-cream cow's milk cheese named after him. Brieette Severon once said, animals feed themselves, men eat, but only wise men know the art of eating.