Eat real food. Eat a lot. Mostly local.
I’m prompted to ask this question for two reasons: 1) It’s fun and 2) Michael Pollan is wrong!
That’s right, I said it. Michael Pollan got me thinking about this because everyone seems to love and quote his mini-tidbits of nutritional wisdom. They’re becoming so commonly quoted that most people are unaware they stem from his writings. Here’s a few you’ve probably heard:
“Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”
“Avoid food products that make health claims.”
“Shop the perimeters of the supermarket and stay out of the middle aisles.”
I love them and quote them myself all the time! And here’s probably the most popular one of all:
“Eat Food. Not a lot. Mostly plants.”
Sounds good, right?
Truth be told…I hate it. And I’m not the only one.
Thousands of people are waking up to our escalating health epidemics in this country. And the further we get from the source of the problem, the more the truth becomes clear. Vegetarians say it’s meat. Vegans say it’s all animal products including eggs and milk. Doctors and dietitians say it’s saturated fat and cholesterol. Fitness experts say it’s lack of exercise. Basically, everyone says it’s some combination of those things. But the real reason is none of the above.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Michael Pollan as much as the next real food enthusiast. His book, Omnivore’s Dilemma, is the Silent Spring of this generation. It raised the red flag on industrialized agriculture and it made us look harder than ever at where our food is coming from. In so doing he has given a voice to small farms, to sustainably grown food and to everything that is good and noble and important about our food system.
His follow up to that book, In Defense of Food, condensed the message in Omnivore’s Dilemma into a more direct look at the controversial events and studies that led to our modern-day ideas about nutrition, which he wryly calls “nutritionism.” Pollan cleverly describes the inherently flawed nature of all nutritional studies, especially those that have led to the lipid hypothesis, the theory that fat causes disease. He attacks the forty-year government-pharmaceutical-medical-promoted war on fat, which he correctly points out has done nothing to improve our collective health. Pollan blows apart the lipid hypothesis with sheer venom and wit:
What the Soviet Union was to the ideology of Marxism, the Low-Fat Campaign is to the ideology of nutritionism–its supreme test and, as is now coming clear, its most abject failure.
At this point you’re probably saying to yourself, Hold on just a minute. Are you really saying the whole low-fat deal was bogus? But my supermarket is still packed with low-fat this and no-cholesterol that! My doctor is still on me about my cholesterol and telling me to switch to low-fat everything. I was flabbergasted at the news too, because no one in charge–not in the government, not in the public health community–has dared to come out and announce: Um, you know everything we’ve been telling you for the last thirty years about the links between dietary fat and heart disease? And fat and cancer? And fat and fat? Well, this just in: It now appears that none of it was true. We sincerely regret the error.
No, the admissions of error have been muffled, and the recent mea culpas impossible to find. But read around the recent scientific literature and you will find a great many scientists beating a quiet retreat from the main tenets of the lipid hypothesis.
Pollan contrasts the low fat mantra with nutritionism’s greatest enemy: the almighty Common Sense. In a chapter from In Defense of Food titled “The Elephant in the Room,” Pollan discusses the life and research of Dr. Weston Price. Price traveled the world in the 1930s studying the diets of cultures untouched by civilization. Dr. Price found a wide variety of diets but nowhere did he find cultures eating low fat or low cholesterol. He found that most cultures relied heavily on animal foods be they milk, meat, or eggs and found that these foods were considered sacred for good health, child development, and fertility. And nowhere did Dr. Price find type II diabetes, heart disease, or any of the other major epidemics that plague us today.
