September Book Discussion: In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
What should I eat? What’s the best diet? Are fat and cholesterol good or bad? Are plants good or bad?
It’s hard to know who or what to listen to when it comes to food and dietary choices. Nutrition recommendations seem to be constantly changing, and the changes always seem to conflict with each other. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers, but in his book In Defense of Food Michael Pollan tries to break the confusion behind nutrition down into three easy rules:
Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.
Today, we’re breaking this down, discussing these ideas, and finding out how nutrition got so complicated.
Food versus Nutrients
Over the last 100 years, our thinking about what we eat has changed. In the past, our diet consisted of food; we ate “real” things like meat, fruits, vegetables, and, for the most part, things that we made and often grew at home. Today, if you walk through the grocery store, so many of what’s on our shelves is heavily processed foods with an absurd amount of ingredients, all pushing health claims like “Contains 6 B Vitamins,” “Fortified with Iron,” “Low Fat,” or “High Fiber.” The focus is less on WHAT we’re eating and more on what’s IN what we’re eating. There’s a heavy focus (and a ton of marketing) on the nutrient content of food, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it creates a division in our minds about food. It convinces us that a Twinkie and an apple are both healthy because there are nutrients in both of them, even though most people realize that’s absurd.
This isn’t to say that considering what nutrients are entering our bodies is a bad thing. We do need certain amounts of vitamins and minerals to ensure that we don’t end up with deficiency-related diseases like scurvy or rickets. We need nutrients to ensure that our bodies are functioning optimally. But the current market tells us that we can be healthy eating all the heavily processed and chemical-filled foods in our grocery stores, simply because they contain some of the nutrients we need.
How did we get from thinking about food to thinking about nutrients? What changed in our society?
The answer to that, unfortunately, is politics. In the mid-1900s, a ton of new health and nutrition research was coming out. Diseases like diabetes and heart disease were on the rise, and the government was expected to do something about it. To do so, they started creating guidelines about how we should eat; things like the Food Pyramid and MyPlate came out of these initial dietary guidelines. The first set of guidelines recommended reducing the intake of certain foods, like red meat and dairy, which seemed to increase the risk of heart disease and other conditions - these were very clear about what to eat and what not to eat.
Naturally, the beef and dairy industries didn’t like these guidelines and put their lobbies to work. Playing the political game, they changed the guidelines to say “Choose meats, poultry, and fish that will cut down on saturated fat intake.” This is a lot less clear. There’s very little guidance in this guideline. What kind of meat reduces my saturated fat intake? Is beef still okay if it’s leaner?
And so began our switch from food-based thinking to nutrient based-thinking. As Michael Pollan puts it, “Speak no more of food, only of nutrients.” One key example of this, and how we talk about food now, comes in when people discuss “cutting carbs.” They’re not cutting out bread, sugar, or Twinkies; they’re cutting carbs. Do these mean the same thing? Yes, kind of. But by saying you’re “cutting carbs,” you might also be implying that carbs are the bad guy and that bread, sugar, and Twinkies are okay.
Another key issue with this “Food vs. Nutrients” issue is that food is simple (like eat less red meat), while nutrients are complicated (like eat less saturated fat). You don’t automatically know which foods are high in saturated fats and which ones aren’t, so you need an expert to tell you how to eat. We’ve come to understand that nutrition is too complicated for us to manage on our own, so we need “experts” to tell us what to eat, how to eat, and when to eat. This is a lie that serves the interest of the food and medical industries. Your great-grandma knew how to eat; assuming she could afford the food and wasn’t in the midst of the Great Depression, her risk of getting any of today’s common chronic illnesses (cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, etc.) was a tiny fraction of your risk of getting any of those. It’s easier to eat healthy when you consider food. It’s much harder when we think about nutrients.
So that’s how we got here, and that’s how this food versus nutrients division has affected us. How can we fix it?
1. Eat Food
“Well duh,” you might be thinking. Isn’t everything in the grocery store considered food?
Yes, kind of. There’s a lot of food and foodlike things in the grocery store. Pollan suggests some ideas to determine if something is “food” or just “foodlike”:
Would your great-grandmother recognize it as food?
Are there more than five ingredients? Are any of them unfamiliar or unpronounceable?
Avoid food products that make health claims.
Shop the outside aisle of the grocery store, and browse your local farmers’ market when possible.
Consider your great-grandmother in the grocery store. Walking around the outside aisles, she’d feel right at home, knowing (pretty much) what everything is. Then she wanders into the middle aisles and sees the plethora of products at the grocery store: squeezable yogurts and applesauce, ice cream, snack bars, sugar cereals, and potato chips, just to name a few. She would wonder what these are, and she would be really confused by the ingredients label (as many of us are). She might wonder why these foods are claiming to be high in fiber or iron or B vitamins. She wouldn’t recognize any of this stuff as food, not the food she knows anyway.
These questions essentially help you break food down into two categories - whole foods and processed foods. Whole foods are things like fruits, vegetables, and raw meats - food that is just about 100% from nature, no cooking or baking or mixing or adding chemicals involved. Processed foods are things that typically come in a box, bag, or can, like potato chips, snack cakes, sugar cereal, store-bought bread, and ice cream - things that are prepared in massive quantities to be kept in stores and on shelves for weeks, months, or years until a consumer buys them.
Whole foods, as a general rule, are nutrient-dense (meaning they have more nutrients per calorie than a Twinkie, for example). They provide us with the nutrients we need (plus more bonus nutrients in the case of fruits and vegetables, which contain special phyto- or plant nutrients). Whole foods, like an apple, aren’t marketing that it’s high in fiber or some other nutrient because it doesn’t need to. We know an apple is healthy. In general, for most people, a diet consisting mostly or completely of whole foods will be healthier than a diet with more processed foods. These whole foods are found primarily in the outside aisles of your grocery store and at your local farmer’s market.
2. Not Too Much
The sheer quantity of food that Americans eat tends to be out of proportion with the rest of the world. Many Americans who travel internationally note how much less food they get at restaurants. Not eating too much is a challenge for many Americans.
One factor here is the food we eat - again, whole foods are almost always the better choice. The processed food that we eat is designed to make you want more, designed to make you hungrier and have stronger cravings, so that you eat more, and more, and more. (This is ideal for the food industry because the more you eat, the more food you buy.) Whole foods, like fruits, veggies, and meats, don’t have this effect. They fill you up faster and with fewer calories than processed foods do. Consider how much broccoli you’d need to eat to get full versus how many potato chips.
How do we mitigate how much we eat? Pollan offers some key suggestions here:
Eat at a table (not at a desk, car, couch, or La-Z-Boy)
Avoid eating alone
Eat slowly
Prepare your own food
Eating only at a table, and not at your desk, in your car, or in the living room on the couch or reclining chair makes you really think if you want to eat. You have to ask “Do I want to eat enough to take a break from (insert activity here)?” Eating with someone else helps you pace yourself (eating slower), while also providing an important social and community aspect of eating that we often miss out on nowadays. Eating slower allows your body to register when it gets full, so you can avoid overstuffing yourself.
Preparing your own food is perhaps my favorite of all Pollan’s recommendations. It allows you to use whole foods (or at least, the least processed foods possible). It connects you to your food and the meal you’re eating, making you more aware of what and how much you’re eating. It gives you and your family an opportunity to spend time together and work together. Usually, your homecooked meal will taste better than the premade, store-bought version as well. This recommendation is easier today than it ever has been - there are recipes and copycats for almost any food, from Taco Bell’s potatoes to frozen pizza to KFC’s chicken.
3. Mostly Plants
This is probably the most debatable point that Pollan makes. The meat versus plants debate has been ongoing for decades, and there’s really not a right answer. It depends on your specific health, biochemistry, and opinions. But, regardless of the debate, it’s hard to eat mostly whole foods without eating plants. Here are some of Pollan’s tips on this subject:
Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.
Buy a space-freezer and buy good, local meat in bulk.
Eat wild food when possible.
Eat more like the French, Greeks, Indians, Italians, or Japanese.
Don’t look for the magic bullet.
Essentially, Pollan is recommending that we focus on plants (though meat is fine too, for most people, to help us get all our necessary proteins and vitamins). Focusing on foods grown locally, as well as wild-grown or wild-caught foods, generally ensures that there are more nutrients in the food; foods grown elsewhere and shipped across the country (or across the world) tend to lose their nutritious quality during shipping, and many are nutrient-poor right out of the ground due to irresponsible farming practices.
Other cultures, like those listed above, tend to have healthier relationships with food (eating the right food and not too much of it). Those listed also have significantly better health outcomes than we do in America, including a longer life expectancy, less age-related disability, and less chronic disease like diabetes and Alzheimer’s. Taking recipes, meals, and lifestyle choices from these cultures can help us eat better, be happier, and live longer. What to borrow from these cultures really depends on you and what you prefer. Take some time to do some research and experiment!
And perhaps his biggest point. There is no magic bullet to health and wellness. There is no miracle cure. Getting and staying healthy requires genuine effort and work.
Who Should Read This Book?
This book is a great read for anyone confused by diet and nutrition recommendations. It takes the complexities of nutrition, explains why they exist, and tells you how to escape those complexities and get back to the simplicity of food.
This is a great read for any American. Our standard American diet has made us confused as to what real food is and how we should enjoy it. This book will help guide you back to what food should be and how we should be enjoying it.
This article gives you some of the basics of the book, but Pollan presents these ideas and why they’re important in a more organized and polished way. It’s a must-read.
If you have questions or concerns about your health or nutrition, please reach out to us.
You can call or text us with questions or to schedule an appointment at 763-373-9710. You can also schedule online here!
Next month, we will be discussing Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. We’ll post some updates and fun facts on our Facebook and Instagram throughout the month. Feel free to follow or read along with us!
Wishing you the best,
Dr. Nicholas Carlson
Northbound Chiropractic
Serving Delano, MN, Maple Plain, and the rest of Wright and West Hennepin Counties
Reference: Pollan, M. (2008). In defense of food: an eater's manifesto. New York, Penguin Press.