A Better Theory: In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

Some might remember the Good Calories, Bad Calories, by Gary Taubes discussion of a couple years ago. In that thread I defended Gary Taubes theory that the diseases of western civilization (basically, heart disease and diabetes) were caused not by fat but by refined carbohydrates. Taubes was right about the dangers of refined carbohydrates, but they're not the whole story.In his book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, Michael Pollan describes a better theory. Our grocery stores have become filled not with food, but with food-like substances. The goals of reducing costs and spoilage, fighting pests, and increasing food abundance have given us food that is lower in quality in terms of nutrition. Ironically it is the increased focus on nutrition, what Pollan calls nutritionism, that is largely responsible for our current plight.Nutritionism is the selection of food based on its nutrition label. Pollan critisizes nutrition science for thinking important only what it can measure and describes its checkered history. For example, when nutrition science first became able to detect and measure cholesterol, then cholesterol became the big bugaboo, and based on this science the FDA issued guidelines that were later proved wrong. Nutrition science later repeated this error with antioxidants, and then again later with omega-3's and omega-6's. Whoops.Pollan's big point is that science's necessary focus on isolating each individual component and measuring its effects in isolation completely misses what is going on in something as complex as food, especially when it enters the gut of something as complex as human beings. In essence he's claiming that we just have no idea what's really happening, and the best that we can do is just eat real food. That means avoiding processed foods as much as possible. Try to eat what your grandparents or great grandparents might have eaten.He has some simple rules, I'll list what I remember:

1. Avoid foods with more than five ingredients.
2. Avoid foods with high fructose corn syrup.
3. Avoid foods with any ingredients you can't pronounce.

One thing he mentioned in his book that I didn't already know and that scared me is that the nutrition levels in our food have dropped. This apparently is something that is well known. We have figures for the vitamin and mineral contents of meats and vegetables over time, and they're lower today than they were, averaging maybe 30% lower if memory serves me correctly. Making foods more immune to spoilage is usually accomplished by reducing or removing those components most prone to spoilage, and unfortunately for us those components contain a lot of the nutritional value. Growing food faster (by letting it mainline nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium from fertilizer) gives it less time to absorb nutrients from the soil. And of course the soil is only fortified with those components that food science has identified so far. They of course don't yet know what they don't yet know, but they'll make their recommendations anyway. The result is unintended dietary experimentation on human beings on a massive scale.Pollan critcizes Taubes for making the same mistake as the anti-fat fanatics he excoriates. The anti-fat fanatics focused on fat as the culprit to the exclusion of all else, and Taubes is making the mistake of focusing on carbohyrdrates as the culprit to the exclusion of all else. Pollan is as critical of refined carbohydrates as Taubes, and he says makes all the same criticisms of easily available glucose and fructose as Taubes (though in much lesser detail), he just thinks it only part of the full story.Some might wonder how the diet is going. Beginning around 5 years ago I lost 30 pounds on the low-carb diet, gained 5 pounds back, and that's where I am now. Keeping weight down means keeping food consumption down. All the time. You can't diet, lose weight, then stop dieting. The only way to keep the weight off is to continue the diet. Eating is a whole lot less fun that it used to be, mainly because I get to do so little of it. Anniversary's next weekend, we get to go out and ignore the diet, oh boy, oh boy!!!--Percy

There's no implied suggestion to not read the nutrition label. The challenge in supermarkets is telling the difference between actual food and food-like products, and that requires looking at the nutrition label. The hints on that list are intended as an aid to recognizing this difference.I can tell you're skeptical, which is fine, but you don't say why, so I'd be shooting in the dark if I attempted to respond.I just remembered another hint:

4. Avoid foods that make health claims.

--Percy

Severe in the general population? Well, I suppose it depends upon how one chooses to look at it. One of the interesting ironies of the success of modern industrial food production is doctors seeing increasing numbers of kids who are both obese and undernourished. Is that one visible symptom of a severe and pervasive problem, or just a tiny group making extremely poor dietary choices?Pollan suggests that the reductionist approach to nutritional science (focusing on one thing at a time in isolation) has a long record of failure (I'll add trans-fats in margarine, long promoted as healthier than butter, to the failures I mentioned earlier). Scientists investigate what their tools permit them to investigate, and researching whole foods with their vast diversity of chemicals interacting with the incredibly complex and highly diverse human body isn't even close to within their means.Pollan advises that it is best to simply ignore the claims of the food and nutritional industries and simply eat food. Locally grown normal, everyday food. Pollan mentions a few examples of food-like substances that aren't really food, like Go-Gurt and Sara Lee's whole wheat white bread (Think about that last one - whole wheat but white? How do they do that? Pollan actually explains how they do that, and it ain't pretty.)As I mentioned earlier, Pollan suggests that the diseases of western civilization aren't due to fat (the nemesis promoted by food research at one time) or carbohydrates (in refined form a great danger, but not the sole nemesis of Taubes' claims), but due to overall diet. Over time our food has become less nutritious by the objective measures available to us today, and who knows how much worse the situation is than we actually know given the things we don't measure because we don't know they're important, or can't measure, or haven't even discovered yet.The link between a western diet and increases in heart disease and diabetes is obvious - the statistics tell us this in no uncertain terms. But how much else might the western diet be responsible for? Increasing rates of autism? ADHD? Asthma? Pollan doesn't mention these problems, but his book does make one wonder.--Percy

Well, the advice is intended for the general public, but for an extreme example of common sense gone bad we need only consider the belief that analyzing food components in isolation is a sound basis for all nutritional advice. Can you think of a good example of any of the items in Pollan's list causing that kind of extreme harm? I don't have a nutrition label for apples, but I do have one for a bag of frozen peas, and nutrition labels don't break down whole foods into their chemical constituents. The ingredients are listed as peas and salt. The nutrition label lists non-zero amounts of sodium, dietary fiber, sugars, vitamin A, Vitamin C and Iron. I'm sure if we had a list of the actual chemical constituents of peas that many would be unrecognizable to most of us, but that's not what is listed on nutrition labels. What gets listed on nutrition labels is what is added to the whole food. Anyway, clearly a bag of frozen peas qualifies as real food according to Pollan's criteria.But is a Fiber One Oats & Peanut Butter snack bar real food? It has a great many recognizable ingredients like peanuts and whole grain oats, but it also has a few unrecognizable ingredients, such as maltodextrin and mixed tocopherols, so by Pollan's criteria it's not real food. What is the worst that could happen if people decided to eat snack bars that don't have maltodextrin and mixed tocopherols? Or if they can't find such snack bars, if they instead ate peanuts and some Cheerios?I'm eating the snack bar now.--Percy

The sentence immediately preceding the one you quoted was important to setting the context. As I said, Pollan's main point is that food and people are far too complex for an analysis of individual components in isolation to yield meaningful results. The effect of real food is more than just the sum of its constituent chemicals analyzed in isolation, and nutrition research has proven the truth of this over and over again with their continual retraction of past advice in the face of new knowledge. They seem locked in to a repetitive cycle where each new discovery fills them with confidence that now, finally, they have the story straight, and after that's it's just a short little hop, skip and a jump to new FDA nutrition advice that will be found wrong in ten years. The old investment adviser joke asking if they're so smart how come you're not rich could be reformulated for nutrition researchers: If they're so smart, how come the health of societies eating western style diets declines year after year.The French paradox, the conundrum where the French are healthier while eating a worse diet, is an example of myopic nutritional thinking at work. Red wine, among other ideas, was actually seriously proposed and seriously researched to see if it was providing an ameliorative effect for the poor French diet. It never occurred to nutrition researchers that perhaps their ideas of what constituted a healthy diet was what was truly paradoxical.Pollan's bottom line advice is to eat real food (by which he means unprocessed foods), mostly vegetables, because societies on these kinds of traditional diets are far healthier than those on western style diets as measured by incident rates of heart disease and diabetes.--Percy

Hi Jon,About what the fat undernourished kids were eating, I don't know.About what foods Pollan meant where the nutritional levels have dropped over time as industrial farms have focused more on yield and spoilage, it was actual crops. The nutrition in animals has changed, too, by changing to a grain based diet and adding hormones and other chemicals, but Pollan wasn't specific about the changes in their nutritional make-up. What developing society are you going to compare us to? After all, the US is 40th in the world for longevity. Is Cuba a developing country? They're ahead of us. How about Chile or Cyprus? They're ahead of us, too. Guadeloupe? Yep, them too. Greece? Yep. And they're all accomplishing this longevity without anything near the quality of US healthcare.--Percy

Pollan doesn't think so either. The point meant to be conveyed was that the influence of the food industry is so pervasive and powerful that they have even influenced the nutritional content of crops, so one can just imagine how much damage they have done to the nutritional content of more processed foods. Yes, that's Pollan's message. His basic dietary advice is to eat food (as opposed to processed foods), mostly vegetables. He suggests purchasing meat and produce from local farmers, the more local the better. He really likes the idea of a home garden.--Percy

One thing Pollan mentions is that the amount people eat is inversely proportional to the effort to prepare the food. Perhaps we're only willing to invest so much total time in preparing and eating a meal, and the more time we spend preparing the less time we'll spend eating.I like the idea of making our own snack bars. My wife's the cook in the house, I'll see if she's interested.--Percy

Oh, I see, you're questioning the proposition that whole foods are healthier than processed foods, and that traditional diets are healthier than the western style diet. Well, as I said, nutrition researchers don't have the ability to study a vast dichotomy of substances operating in concert in the human digestive track at the same time. What they have is the ability to study one substance at a time in isolation. Obviously the results using this approach are not good, as the diminished health of societies on western style diets attests. One can wait for the scientific capabilities of nutrition researchers to improve to the point where they can describe just what whole foods are doing that individual substances all combined together in a factory do not do, or one can accept that we aren't capable of this level of detail at the current time and simply behave prudently given the data we do have: don't follow a western style diet.One thing that has been observed over and over again is that when people abandon a traditional diet for a western style diet that they soon begin experiencing the diseases of western civilization, namely heart disease and diabetes. Pollan describes an Australian study that for a seven week period returned 10 bush people living in the city, all with type 2 diabetes, to the bush where they returned to their traditional diet and experienced dramatic improvements to their health: --PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

The interesting contradiction of processed foods is that they're being increasingly promoted as healthy simply because certain vitamins and minerals have been added. For example, Frito Lay claims their chips are "Heart Healthy" because of their use of corn oil (instead of whatever they used to use). Corn oil is not usually thought of as a health food, but under current FDA rules for what they call "qualified" health statements, Frito Lay gets to print "Heart Healthy" in big letters on their packaging with a tiny asterisk at the bottom saying: Gotta love that fine print!Anyway, the evidence that *is* available should lead one to strongly doubt that simply adding the vitamins and minerals to processed food that we know exist in real food will produce a healthy population, and then there are all the substances in food we don't yet know are important or haven't even discovered yet. Twenty years ago who was worried about omega-3? Ten years from now some new substance will have health primacy, at least in the minds of nutrition researchers and food marketeers.--Percy

Fructose has been implicated in the increasing rates of diabetes because, unlike glucose (metabolized by insulin), it is metabolized by the liver where, if energy isn't needed, it is metabolized into triglycerides (fat). As a prime contributor to obesity, fructose overconsumption (carbonated soda is a significant source) receives serious consideration as a cause of rising rates of metabolic syndrome (pre-diabetes) and diabetes.From J. S. White's LinkedIn page: Oh, gee, what a surprise, his research is funded by the food and beverage industry. In past times he would have worked for the tobacco companies. Actually, I feel bad saying that. A guys gotta make a living, and the food industry is where the money is for his area of interest. When I see guys like this I just thank God I never have to make any moral choices in my own work, programming. Well, there are some, but they're kind of way indirect.--Percy

Thanks for the admission, I'm going to stop taking the bait now.--Percy

Hi Taq,With regard to fructose, you might be confusing me with something someone else said, maybe Onifre. The soundbite form of Pollan's dietary advice that I've been repeating is to eat food, mostly vegetables. That doesn't exclude fruit, but he isn't pushing it, either.Pollan's hypothesis is that the chemicals in any food exist in a matrix of fiber with all the other complex chemicals of a living plant, and that because of this they are experienced much differently by the human body than the same chemicals merely added to processed food. Fructose in an apple is in some incredibly complex arrangement of other chemicals and fiber, while fructose in HFCS, whether in a liquid such as soda or in a solid processed food, is available quickly and immediately, flooding the body with both glucose and fructose. The flood of glucose causes insulin spikes. The flood of fructose is metabolized by the liver into tryglycerides which it releases in to the bloodstream where the high insulin levels resulting from the glucose cause the triglycerides to be taken up into cells as fat.The glycemic index measures how fast a food's glucose (not fructose) is absorbed into the bloodstream, which is what causes insulin levels to rise. Apples have a glycemic index of 38, while the glucose in HFCS has a glycemic index of 100. Apples have a ratio of fructose to glucose of 3:1, while for HFCS it is 1.2:1. The much lower glycemic index of apples means that the insulin response is much lower than for HFCS, and the fructose will be equally slow in reaching the liver to produce triglycerides, so compared to HFCS there will be less insulin in the bloodstream, and also fewer tryglycerides for the insulin to store away into fat cells.I noticed someone boasting of how poorly he ate when young and very active, but young and very active people don't usually get heart disease or diabetes. That happens later. Where longevity is concerned we never fully escape the errors of our youth. It would make sense if longevity, on average, were a function of the quality of one's diet measured over a lifetime.--Percy

I think both Onifre and I agree with the point you're making, that a fructose molecule is a fructose molecule is a fructose molecule. The origin doesn't matter.Push with fifty pounds of force on a brick wall for a hundred seconds and nothing will happen, but push with 5000 pounds of force for one second and you might get somewhere. The hypothesis we're advocating in this discussion about fructose is that it's the same with some biochemical processes, that fructose molecules delivered rapidly to the bloodstream have a significantly larger effect out of proportion to the same amount of fructose delivered slowly. Ten grams of fructose delivered to the bloodstream in just ten minutes will have a much bigger impact than when delivered over a period of an hour or so.I may disagree with Onifre somewhat on the interaction between fiber and fructose. I believe that fructose intimately integrated into the fiber of an apple because they grew together is experienced substantially differently by the human digestion system than just the combination of 6 grams of fructose, 2 grams of glucose and 4 grams of fiber. The hypothesis is that real food is more than just the sum of its parts. This hypothesis has a substantial chance of being true because, as nutrition science keeps discovering, food has components we don't understand yet or even know about.--Percy

Research suggests otherwise. I know the 5% increase (which means a 10% difference between fructose and glucose levels) seems tiny, but animal research indicates that HFCS causes substantially greater weight gain than sugar when caloric intake is held constant, for example, A sweet problem: Princeton researchers find that high-fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain.Concerning people, while correlation doesn't prove causation, studies indicate that the obesity epidemic is coincident with increasing use of HFCS in food, for example, Consumption of high-fructose corn syrup in beverages may play a role in the epidemic of obesity.The food and beverage industry has successfully painted a picture of controversy concerning the dangers of HFCS, but many are of the opinion (and I share this opinion) that this is just the "no evidence that tobacco is dangerous to health" stonewalling and denial game all over again.--Percy