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How Michael Pollan Has Missed The Boat

Sunday, March 20th, 2011

Eat real food. Eat a lot. Mostly local.

If you could encapsulate what you believe about food in three statements of three words or less, what would it be?

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.

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Posted in Books, Health | 2 Responses »

What Veg*ns Can Learn from Traditional Foods

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

Source: Nourished Kitchen

While the traditional foods movement seems to focus heavily on the inclusion of high-quality, pasture-raised meat and dairy products and is, indeed, a largely animal food-based diet, that doesn’t meant that it offers no guidance or dietary wisdom for vegetarians. Indeed, there’s a lot that vegetarians can glean from the traditional foods movement and, in many ways, the practices advocated by traditional foods enthusiasts and organizations like the Weston A Price Foundation and the Price Pottenger Nutrition Foundation might prove even more important for vegetarians and vegans who rely on grains and legumes for much of their foods. From soaking and souring grains and legumes to fermenting veggies and eating healthy fats, here’s five things that vegetarians can learn from the traditional foods movement.

1. To soak, sour or sprout grains, legumes, nuts, seeds and beans.

Grains, nuts, seeds, beans and legumes often make up the foundation of a vegetarian or vegan diet. For this reason, it’s critical that vegans and vegetarians learn to prepare these foods to reap the greatest nutritional reward from them. To prevent premature sprouting until conditions for plant growth are optimal, grains, nuts, seeds, legumes and beans are potent sources of antinutrients which include phytate and enzyme inhibitors. These antinutrients cause reduced mineral absorption and reduced ability to properly digest foods. Since vegans and vegetarians forgo mineral-rich meats and bone broths, deriving much of their mineral intake from plant-based sources, one of the most significant and beneficial actions an adherent to a plant-based diet can take to maximize nutrient intake would be to soak, sour or sprout all their grains, nuts, beans, legumes and seeds – a traditional practice that renders the nutrients in these foods more bioavailable¹.

Sprouting, soaking and fermenting grains, nuts, beans, seeds and legumes activates the enzyme phytase which neutralizes phytate, and these traditional processes help to free up minerals otherwise bound in a raw, untreated state. Indeed, once phytate has been adequately degraded, legumes can become good sources of both iron and zinc². The simple act of sprouting and roasting oats, or malting, before preparing a breakfast porridge has been shown to increase zinc absorption by 55% and iron by 47%³. Sprouting mung beans followed by a simple fermentation increases the absorbable iron by over 70% compared to the untreated bean⁴. Simply choosing to bake whole grain sourdough bread over regular whole grain bread not only reduced antinutrient content, but significantly increases the availability of magnesium⁵. Incidentally the process of souring grains as required in sourdough bread appears to naturally increase the levels of folate by as much as three-fold¹³.

In a plant-based, vegetarian or vegan diet you miss out on animal foods as a dense source of minerals, for this reason you can do your body a favor by making sure to properly prepare grains, nuts, beans, seeds and legumes to maximize the availability of iron, zinc, magnesium and other minerals. Read more about soaking grains, beans and legumes.

2. To only consume traditionally fermented soy products and with iodine-rich companion foods.

For many vegans and vegetarians, soy and soy foods make up a base of the diet: soy milks and yogurt, tofu, texturized vegetable protein, soybean oil, soy-based protein powder, cooked soy beans and other soy foods. Unfortunately, soy foods, much like all beans, are a potent source of antinutrients. Soy’s potent isoflavones can also interfere with human endocrine function, particularly the function of the thyroid and reproductive health of both men and women and may have broader implications for the population as a whole⁷. Properly prepared through traditional means of fermentation (note that soaking and germinating on their own prove inadequate), as in traditional soy sauce and tempeh can reduce phytates found in soy almost completely. Also, by serving small condiment-sized portions of soy foods with traditional iodine-rich accompaniments like seaweed, one may help counteract soy’s antithyroid properties.

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Nutrition and Physical Degeneration

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Native American skulls, uncovered in the United States and Canada show perfect teeth. People dying without any dental deformity before the the advent of the modern diet!

More than sixty years ago, a Cleveland dentist named Weston A. Price decided to embark on a series of unique investigations that would engage his attention and energies for the next ten years. Possessed of an inquiring mind and a spiritual nature, Price was disturbed by what he found when he looked into the mouths of his patients. Rarely did an examination of an adult client reveal anything but rampant decay, often accompanied by serious problems elsewhere in the body such as arthritis, osteoporosis, diabetes, intestinal complaints and chronic fatigue. (They called it neurasthenia in Price’s day.) But it was the dentition of younger patients that gave him most cause for concern. He observed that crowded, crooked teeth were becoming more and more common, along with what Price called “facial deformities”–overbites, narrowed faces, underdevelopment of the nose, lack of well-defined cheekbones and pinched nostrils. Such children invariably suffered from one or more complaints that sound all too familiar to mothers of the 1990s: frequent infections, allergies, anemia, asthma, poor vision, lack of coordination, fatigue and behavioral problems. Price did not believe that such “physical degeneration” was God’s plan for mankind. He was rather inclined to believe that the creator intended physical perfection for all human beings, and that children should grow up free of ailments.

Price’s bewilderment gave way to a unique idea. He would travel to various isolated parts of the earth where the inhabitants had no contact with “civilization” to study their health and physical development. His investigations took him to isolated Swiss villages and a windswept island off the coast of Scotland. He studied traditional Eskimos, Indian tribes in Canada and the Florida Everglades, South Seas islanders, Aborigines in Australia, Maoris in New Zealand, Peruvian and Amazonian Indians and tribesmen in Africa. These investigations occurred at a time when there still existed remote pockets of humanity untouched by modern inventions; but when one modern invention, the camera, allowed Price to make a permanent record of the people he studied. The photographs Price took, the descriptions of what he found and his startling conclusions are preserved in a book considered a masterpiece by many nutrition researchers who followed in Price’s footsteps: Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Yet this compendium of ancestral wisdom is all but unknown to today’s medical community and modern parents.

Read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price Online

Buy Nutrition and Physical Degeneration

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