In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
Controversial New Book Examines Food, Health and Nutrition Science
Feb 24, 2009
Michael Pollan manages to keep a potentially boring subject interesting with his tongue-in-cheek voice and lively images in his book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. The book examines everything related to diet and health in America, including nutrition science, the USDA, and the upsurge of chronic “Western” diseases resulting from diet.
Politics Behind USDA Dietary Guidelines
In Defense of Food begins by examining the evolution of public policy regarding nutrition. Using examples like the political controversy around the 1977 Dietary Goals for the United States (America’s first food pyramid), it points out the role of food lobbyist groups in shaping American dietary policy.
According to Pollan, politicians now are now “careful to frame [their] recommendations nutrient by nutrient rather than food by food, to avoid offending any powerful interests.”
After reading this book, one starts to question why the United States government ever got into dispensing dietary advice in the first place.
Nutrition Science and Nutritionism
Nutrition science is the study of nutrients in foods. The problem is that we don’t know everything yet, so attempting to engineer healthier foods is failing. The book calls our current nutrient-by-nutrient ideology about health “nutritionism.”
Pollan admits that while it may be useful to research isolated nutrients, a reductionist approach to foods is devastating to public health. When we get in the habit of removing nutrients from their food context, we begin to treat something as simple as eating food very strangely.
In fact, In Defense of Food advises us to avoid eating anything with a health claim even printed on the label.
Links Between Diet and Disease
Americans are some of the unhealthiest people in the world, routinely suffering from “Western diseases” like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension.
Pollan quotes studies that show a direct relationship between the Western diet and these diseases. As the book explains, “the human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet… does not seem to be one of them.”
In Defense of Food paints a very bleak picture of eating in America, where people are eating processed “foodlike products” when they believe they are eating health food. This leads to a nation that “manages to be both overfed and undernourished.” Things are not looking good for American health.
Eating Algorithms
After describing how decades of nutritionism and professional health advice have made Americans “sicker and fatter,” In Defense of Food goes on to explain how to return to eating healthily.
According to Pollan, in order “to escape the Western diet and the ideology of nutritionism, we have only to stop eating and thinking that way.” That’s why the book offers advice in terms of “eating algorithms” rather than specific menus.
Readers of In Defense of Food will come away with a lot to think about. The book contradicts practically everything we think we know about food, health, and nutrition, and offers us an alternate way to consider the basic human experience of eating.
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