A Review of "In Defense of Food" by Michael Pollan - Part II

In Part II (The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization) of his just released book In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan begins with a tale of ten middle-aged Australian Aborigines, all overweight diabetics, who had been living in a settlement and eating a Western diet chock full of refined carbohydrates. Kerin O'Dea, a nutrition scientist, asked them to participate in an experiment: spend 7 weeks in the bush hunting and gathering the traditional Aboriginal foods. The result was dramatic. They lost weight, naturally, but also "all of the metabolic abnormalities of type II diabetes were either greatly improved or completely normalized...."

What are the diseases brought about by the infamous Western ways of eating? Obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension and diet-related cancers are the big ones. O'Dea and others who have replicated her findings in other native populations (Native Americans and native Hawaiians) are showing us that it doesn't take a long time to reverse the ill effects of our horrible ways of eating things that really are not food. They also show us that the idea of "Nutritionism" with its single minded focus on fats or carbs as the guilty culprits that make us fat or sick is wrong-headed. It isn't one thing, it's the entire range of foods and how they are produced that act together to either make us healthy or ill.

The typical Western diet consists of "lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything except fruits, vegetables, and whole grains." Pollan points out that this is not new information, that scientists began recognizing the effects of western vs indigenous diets in the early 20th centuries. People like Albert Schweitzer observed that when native populations were introduced to refined flours and sugar and other industrialized food products, western diseases were sure to follow.

All kinds of theories were offered -- from natives being poorly adapted to modern foods, to genetic and demographic theories. But Pollan points out that "When you adjust for age, rates of chronic diseases like cancer and type 2 diabetes are considerably higher today than they were in 1900." Chillingly he notes that most of us today simply accept that conditions like cancer and heart disease are givens, so we look for medical solutions rather than focusing in on what and how we eat.

In a fascinating account of a Canadian dentist by the name of Weston A. Price, who set up a practice in Cleveland, OH, we find an answer to the question of why industrialized societies have such great dental problems. Price traveled the world to solve this mystery. He searched for native populations that had not been exposed to modern refined foods. No matter where he found these natives (in the mountains of Switzerland, lowlands of Africa, Australian bush, New Zealand or the Everglades of Florida and more), they all had no need of dentists. Their teeth were healthy and their gums free of diseases.

Not content with mere observation, he took pictures of the teeth (this was in the 1930s) and sent home samples of their foods to be analyzed . He found that all his population groups were eating a diet that contained on average ten times as much vitamins A and D as the typical Western diet. What is most amazing is that none of the diets were the same. For example, the Masai ate hardly any plant foods, for example, while the people in the Hebrides consumed no dairy.

What he was on to was how nutritionally starved we have become in the quest to process foods so that we can ship them great distances and store them for months and years upon the shelf. The closer we humans are to the natural links of the food chain, the more nutrition we gain from our food.

It starts with the the soil, which gets robbed of nutrients to grow more grains to process into refined food products or to feed more animals to slaughter and process to feed more people. Other researchers were developing this critique of an impoverished food supply in the 1930s, but World War II created a demand for industrialized foods (think Spam) and by the end of this horrific Western conflict, processed food was a way of life for most Europeans and Americans.

Pollan puts it bluntly -- the Western diet is:

"...a radical and, at least in evolutionary terms, abrupt set of changes over the course of the last 150 years, not just to our foodstuffs but also to our food relationships, all the way from the soil to the meal. The rise of the ideology of nutirionism is itself part of that change. When we think of s aspecies' environment, we usually think in terms of things like geography, predators and prey and the weather. But of course on e of the most critical components of any creature's environment is the nature of the food available to it and its relationships to the species it eats."

Pollan offers five fundamental recent transformations to our foods that we can reverse if we choose:

1. From whole foods to refined.
2. From complexity to simplicity.
3. From quality to quantity.
4. From leaves to seeds.
5. From food culture to food science.

Pollan goes into great detail and provides excellent examples of what he means for each of the above transformations. I won't give it all away, as I do think this book deserves to be read and talked about and acted upon. I will give you one example for number 5. Pollan talks about how food once was something that was part of one's cultural traditions. What we ate and how it was grown, gathered and prepared was handed down from generation to generation. Now food is packaged as something that is "good for you" with added vitamins and Omega 3s and everything else that has vanished because our soils are depleted and our food is processed to death. Grandmother doesn't tell you what is good for you anymore, it is the nutritionists from General Mills or other corporate food processing behemoths.

Coming soon -- Part III, in which we learn how to get over Nutritionism as a way of eating.

Review: In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan's follow up book to The Omnivore's Dilemma (reviewed here in four parts) provides us with some much needed guidance. After following the four food chains, he described in his previous book, the reader is left contemplating the dilemma and not quite sure what to do. Those four chains were:

1. A fast food meal
2. An Agri-biz organic meal
3. A pastoral meal from a sustainable farm
4. And a meal that was entirely hunted and gathered

None of the meals was vegetarian or vegan, however if I were a meat-eater, I'd stop and think hard before eating animal products from options 1 or 2 after reading how those animals were fed and slaughtered.

Now Pollan addresses the dilemmas he left hanging with this advice:

Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.

Sounds simple, but how to convince people to do that after a life time spent absorbing the typical Western diet? Pollan makes a convincing case. His new book is divided into three sections, which I will review one at a time. Today's section:

The Age of Nutritionism

How did we get from eating food to eating products that must be labeled with complete ingredients, along with amazing pseudo-scientific claims? Leading off with "An Eater's Manifesto," Pollan states:

"...you're better off eating whole fresh foods rather than processed food products. That's what I mean by the recommendation to 'eat food,' which is not quite as simple as it sounds. For while it used to be that food was all you could eat, today there are thousands of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science come in packages elaborately festooned with health claims, which brings me to another, somewhat counterintuitive, piece of advice: If you're concerned about your health, you should probably avid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it's not really food, and food is what you want to eat."

The health claims began in earnest with the advent of nutrients replacing real food in the supermarkets. Product claims of low-fat, low cholestoral, vitamins added all grew out of scientific studies that were trying to discover what exactly is in food that is good for us or bad for us. In the early 1d9th century, William Prout first identified the three major constituents of food: protein, carbohydrates and fat.

Justice Von Liebig followed with his discovery of the essential chemicals for building life from the soil up the food chain: nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. He developed formulas for beef bouillion and the first baby formula (made of cow's milk, wheat flour , malted flour and postassium bicarbonate -- babies who drank it failed to thrive), which were not as nutritious as he expected. It wasn't until micronutrients (vitamins) were discovered in the early 20th century, that nutritional science really began to take off.

Pollan then takes us through a little-known event in 1977 that he says is responsible for the shift away from food to nutrients in the last two decades of the 20th century. The Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human needs, chaired by George McGovern (a man for whom I once voted for president). Responding to reports that the typical US diet was leading to an increase in chronic diseases, the committee prepared a document called "Dietary Goals for the United States."

"The committee learned that while coronary heart disease had soared in the US, certain other cultures that consumed traditional diets based mostly on plants had strikingly low rates of chronic diseases. Epidemiologists had also observed that in America during the war years, when meat and dairy products were strictly rationed, the rate of heart disease had temporarily plummeted, only to leap upward once the war was over."

Based upon all that evidence, the committee issued guidelines that called for Americans to cut down on dairy and red meat. Can you guess who leaped into the fray? Why the red meat and dairy industries, of course. Senator McGovern's state of South Dakota was home to many cattle ranchers. McGovern bowed to pressure and the guidelines were re-written so that Americans were advised to "choose meats, poultry, and fish that will reduce saturated fat intake." Pollan puts it in sharp language:

"...with these subtle changes in wording, a whole way of thinking about food and health underwent a momentous shift. First, notice that the stark message to eat less of a particular food--int his case meat--had been deep-sixed; don't look for it ever again in any official US Government dietary pronouncement. Say what you will about this or that food, you are not allowed officially to tell people to eat less of it or the industry in question will have you for lunch. But there is a path around this immovable obstacle, and it was McGovern's staffers who blazed it: Speak no more of foods, only nutrients."

And so began the age of Nutritionism, in which food is broken down into components which accompanying claims:L lowfat vs saturated fat, high and low cholesterol omega 3 vs omega 6, good carbs vs bad carbs and so on. Pollan points out that the advent of low-fat products coincides with the rise of obesity and diabetes in the US.

Pollan digs in deep to the claims and the research for the various nutrients. This first section is fascinating and enlightening, and leads to a conclusion that when food became a substance filled with nutrients that are either good or bad for you, eating became a chore rather than a pleasure. References to the French way of eating are found throughout the book. The French eat food that is filled with all the wrong stuff, and yet they remain slimmer and healthier than Americans. By the end of In Defense of Food, you will be considering not only French cuisine, but French attitudes about food and its place in your life.

Tomorrow, we'll delve into Part II: The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization. It's not very pretty and it will probably make you feel queasy, rather like the typical American meal.