by Noel Cleland
How much of the food we consume each day should actually be considered food? I must admit, I hadn’t really considered calling it anything else before, but Michael Pollan makes a strong case in his new book that many of the meals that we eat should be considered food-like substances and not food.
It seems that the science of nutrition has taken us down a dangerous path – dangerous in the sense that, at any point in time, we come to the conclusion that we understand the ingredients that make up a healthy diet. However, we don’t have to look back too many years to realize that the nutritionists are still learning what constitutes a healthy diet. In fact, in the years since the food pyramid has been created, we have seen the diet-related diseases get worse. Much of the nutrition science qualifies as reductionist science, focusing on individual nutrients (such as certain fats or carbohydrates or antioxidants) rather than on whole foods or dietary patterns.
What has replaced the whole foods from our grandparents plate are the products that the food scientists have created that are designed to push our evolutionary buttons for sweetness, fat, and salt. These qualities are difficult to find in nature but cheap and easy for the food industry to deploy. In fact, the factors that determine what products to sell in the supermarket have more to do with shelf life, ease of shipping, color, size, and cost than they do the health benefits that food offers for replenishing your body. For the food industry it is preferable to have a scientific rationale for further processing foods – whether by lowering the fat or by boosting omega-3s or fortifying them with antioxidants and probiotics – than to consider the idea that processed foods of any kind are a big part of the problem.
Scientists study variables they can isolate. Yet even the simplest food is a hopelessly complicated thing to analyze, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in intricate and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another. So if you are a nutrition scientist you do the only thing you can do, given the tools at your disposal: break the thing down into its component parts and study those one by one, even if that means ignoring subtle interactions and contexts and the fact that the whole may well be more than the sum of the parts.
A diet based on quantity rather than quality has ushered a new creature onto the world stage: the human being who manages to be both overfed and undernourished. Most of the missing micronutrients are supplied by fruits and vegetables, of which only 20 percent of American children and 32 percent of adults eat the recommended servings.
In his book, Michael Pollan offers a solution: get back to our basics:
Avoid foods that are unfamiliar, unpronounceable, have more than five ingredients, or contain high fructose corn syrup
Avoid foods that make health claims
Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle (where most of the processed foods are)
Get out of the supermarket whenever possible
Eat mostly plants, especially leaves
Eat well-grown food from healthy soils
Needless to say, In Defense Of Food is able to justify these ideas as well as offer more, so you will need to read his book to be convinced I’m sure. Considering how much our food choices can affect our health, shouldn’t we all be taking the time to discover where these food-like substances are taking us?