In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

Great information presented in an engaging and easy to understand format. A must read for anyone interested in maintaining good health. It will infuriate you to learn how little the government agencies that are supposed to be looking out for us are doing and how most of the government nutrition guidance we have been given all these years was worthless.

Michael Pollan wrote In Defense of Food to encourage people to eat more natural foods, home cooked, out of ingredients they know. On one hand I agree completely with this message. On the other hand, I disagree with some of the commentary he provides along the way.I took literally 8 pages of notes while reading this book. Especially during the beginning chapters I was shaking my head and writing down things I disagreed with. Michael makes gross exaggerations to get across a point or simply says questionable things. However, I toughed it out as Michael has obviously done a LOT of research to compile this information. As I got through the first part, he becomes much more evenly balanced and provides quite a lot of helpful information.For example, I agree with him that people should eat more natural foods, including vegetables, and stay away from over-processed foods. I agree that scientists learn information in stages - they might think "all fats are bad" until they realize that there are different types of fat. Our standard white flour has been so processed to make it long lasting that they've removed the nutrition from it. Our breeding has made foods "prettier" while simultaneously removing nutrition. An apple today has only 1/3rd the iron of an apple from 1940.So these things are great to know. However, mixed in with this information are some things I disagree with. For example, Michael takes delight in talking about the French Paradox (that French people drinking wine and eating cream are healthy) and says it proves that western diets are bad. However, a key part of living the French lifestyle is that you walk around a lot - physical activity is a normal part of the day. To say it is "all about eating what you want to eat" is extremely short sighted.Which brings me to another key complaint. He says - repeatedly - that people should just "eat what they want" without thinking about labels. He says that people who worry about fiber or omega-3s are the ones who eat badly. He says people who just "eat what they want to" end up eating well. What?? This is COMPLETELY opposite to my experience. I hear from hundreds of visitors a month who DO eat what they want and ended up extremely obese as a result. This is simply not true.A corollary to Michael's "eat anything" theory is that "native menus" are always perfect. Only the Western diet is bad. However, I can easily name several cultures in which heavy people are quite prevalent. Also, a culture's menu is innately tied to its activity level! The pasta-rich Italian diet is created for hard working Italian farmers. If you are a desk worker and eat tons of heavy Italian pasta every day, you're going to get heavy. It's not that an "Italian Diet" is innately good or bad. However, if you eat the food, you need to also live the lifestyle's activity level to burn off the calorie levels.There are MANY native diets which load in the calories with the assumption that you're a farmer toiling in the fields all day and you need those calories to live. If you take in those calories without being active, you are going to have serious issues.Michael also insists that any food with a nutrition promo on its box is evil. If a food item says "contains lots of fiber!" you should avoid it. He in general is against any nutritional information being shown, apparently. Again this makes no sense at all to me. As much as he loves the "old days", people did get scurvy and other diseases back then. People were malnourished. If something has fiber in it, it's good to know!I definitely agree with some of his summaries. He says we now eat 300 more calories/day than in 1985 and while we are generally overfed we are still undernourished. Our bodies crave more nutrients, so we eat more food, but since we're eating nutrient-poor food it doesn't satisfy the craving.I just wish he could have made those good points without being so single-sighted in blasting "all Western food", praising "all Eastern food". In the same manner he blasts people who "focus on just vitamins" (rather than whole food categories) and then obsesses about omega-3s.I do think it's a good idea to read this book. There is a lot of helpful information in it. Borrow it from a library perhaps. But take the information with a grain of salt. Separate the wheat from the chaff - just like he says to do with all food writers.

Food scientists make "fake foods" or "foodlike substances" through the process of adulteration. The most important thing about any food is not its nutrient content, but its degree of processing, and "refining" is especially deleterious, or so says Michael Pollan in In Defense of Food. For Pollan, refined flour is the first industrial fast food.But the desire for white bread predated the invention of roller mills, as did processes for separating the starchy endosperm from the bran. In a recent paper in the Journal of Food Science, colleagues confirmed consumer preferences for refined over whole wheat bread. We make white bread because that's what people want.Pollan erroneously believes that grains are refined to extend their shelf life by making them less nutritious to pests. However, refining was often initially done to remove anti-nutritional factors from plant foods, and to his credit, Pollan provides the example of soy processing to inactivate trypsin inhibitor. Cassava, the third largest source of carbohydrates for human food, is poisonous unless processed properly.Pollan believes that we have an ancient evolutionary relationship with the seeds of grasses and fruits of plants. Anthropomorphically speaking, "I'll feed you if you spread around my genes." With the exception of succulent fruits, the co-evolution of plants and animals has been a struggle, with plants doing their best to evolve ever greater defense mechanisms to deter animals from eating them. Man has an ancient relationship with the plant genus Nicotiana, having been smoking it since 2000 B.C.E. Should we accept then that smoking is healthy?It's ironic that the book's cover illustration is of lettuce, which we eat at a very young stage to avoid an abundance of bitter compounds produced by the plant as it matures. Pollan suggests we eat only those items that would be recognized as food by our great-great grandmother. Many of the plant foods my great-great-grandmother ate were made edible through selective breeding programs to detoxify them. The 14 or so thousand years since the Neolithic revolution is but a blink in evolutionary time. The co-evolution of plants and humans during this period has largely been directed by the later, as was so eloquently explained in Pollan's Botany of Desire.The book certainly is a manifesto, and an upper-middle class one at that. Oh that we could all live in Northern California, where fresh fruits and vegetables are available locally and year round.My great-great grandmother, and I suspect Mr. Pollan's too, survived the winter months mainly on stored root crops, lots of onions. With the invention of canning, generations from my great-grandmother to the present have "put up" more perishable fruits and vegetables to extend their seasons. But despite the provenance and the satisfaction one derives from it, home canning is hardly an option for many.One non-food, as defined by Pollan, that my great-great grandmother certainly did not eat often or at all is chocolate in its present form. Perhaps I'm partial to this one as chocolate making is among my professional expertise. You see, chocolate is "refined" using steel roller mills, and despite cacao's ancient origins predating the Maya culture, solid eating chocolate is a "food-like substance" as defined by Pollan.Pollan impugns scientific research suggesting cacao may have health benefits, referring sarcastically to the Mars Corporation's endowment of a faculty chair in "chocolate science" at the University of California-Davis, but readily accepts "abundant scientific evidence for the health benefits of alcohol." My biggest criticism of the book is Pollan's selective use of science to support his opinions.Though critical of the methodology used in the Nurse's Health Study and the Women's Health Initiative, which involved over one hundred thousand women followed for eight years or more, Pollan accepts unquestioningly the science of Kerin O'Dea, who observed ten Australian aborigines for seven weeks. The apparent genius of the study was that when it was over, Dr. O'Dea had no idea what caused the improvements in the group's health, though Pollan readily accepts the diet-disease link, ignoring the possibility that an increase in physical exercise or even the placebo effect could have explained the short-term results. An alternative hypothesis is that the group's health improved because they gave up alcohol and ate foods mostly of animal origin, contrary to Pollan's dietary suggestions, but we will never know since "we can't extract from such a study precisely which component of the Western diet we need to adjust."Along with the Neolithic revolution modern food preservation seems to have become man's second fall from grace. But with an expanding world population, food science will become increasingly important for better utilization of finite resources. That's why the World Food Prize selected Dr. Phil Nelson as its 2007 laureate.The complexity of human-food interactions is undeniable, but the same science that led to the solution for deficiency diseases has also implicated trans fats in present maladies, and can contribute to improved health. Though he plays fast and loose with the science, Pollan's dietary advice - eat food, not too much, mostly plants - will probably do no harm. Thirty years ago, a food science instructor of mine needed only two words - variety and moderation - but added that two words hardly a book make (and they certainly cannot be sold for $21.95). However, for what it says about the profession, it's a book every food scientist should read.

A very persuasive treatise on food. Pollan explains why nutritional advice has not worked out well over the years - individual foodstuffs contain so many different substances that it's hard to know what are the active ingredients, as it were, and when it comes to experimenting and leaving something out of a diet or putting something in, there's the whole field of what else we eat or don't eat (to compensate) to consider too. So this is like looking for a needle in a haystack. But then we find that actually there's a lot of skin in this game for food manufacturers who'd like to be able to market processed foods (rather than the simple and pure foodstuffs they are made from) because this is where there's value add in this market and they'd like to market health claims for their processed foods - which also seems generally to be possible…And while humans have evolved to live off a very wide variety of diets in a healthy way, the Western diet hasn't historically been one of them, as we've moved towards chemical treatment of agriculture (impoverishing our basic foodstuffs) and have moved from leaves to grains and then onto refined grains - partly simply for their keeping qualities (if the nutrients aren't there, they'll be easier to preserve from decay)...The final part says what we can do about all this when we eat. Simple messages: avoid the processed stuff; spend more on food and more time preparing (and you will eat less); eat less meat; go for farm shops not supermarkets; and grow your own….Perhaps a little disappointing, but no doubt true. I will also personally be tucking into cheese and olive oil as recommend in Tim Spector's book The Diet Myth. But that book is rather less of a strong reading experience than this!...

Michael's book is witty, informative & simple common sense. It is written in a conversational style & I had a good giggle. I've been concerned & educating myself about food & "nutritionism" since 2005. I am guilty of nutritionism but like Michael's book, I feel like I have come full circle with my eating habits. Eat local, grow your own & eat mainly plants. I always felt so confused about meat, veganism & vegeterianism. Michael gives me some comfort when he says, meat is a side dish. He makes sense of all the nonsense out there & clearly elucidates the links between government agencies, food corporations & marketing. Although the example he gives is mainly about America, being Malaysian I can relate to the underlying & pretty much universal patterns of his book. Malaysians have one of the highest rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease & cancer in Southeast Asia. Our sugar is heavily subsidised & I think there is palm oil in virtually everything. We are after all, a major palm oil producer in the world. Thanks Michael for making sense out of nonsense!

great book with some interesting insights into how we view and treat food . Fascinating how the big corporations manufacturers and politicians can manupulate science /statistics to their own ends

The author says, "Eat food, not too much and mostly plants" and offers a quick shortcut to healthy eating, suggesting that you shouldn't eat anything that your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.Following the Great Grandmother rule blanks out a lot of options (and removes most of the profitability of the agro-food processing industry) but he shows that it is still just viable if a shopper frequents farmers markets or avoids the packaged goods in the central aisles of supermarkets.He also interestingly shows how the food industry plays food science marketing with features such as "added fibre", "added omega3" etc. while ignoring the more beneficial natural sources.

I will give this book full marks - not because its so amazing, as it really just states what I thought was obvious - but because I was so surprised that only a few of his fellow Americans really knew what he was on about. I 've never really been one for conspiracy theories but are there really so many people that are convinced that being obese is simply genetic and not related to eating too many burgers? There are those that want to keep the truth from a public struggling with diet related health issues and this book makes it all surprisingly clear. The French paradox, the Greek paradox (too much fat, alcohol +smoking) - and the elusive American paradox - it will all be revealed.