A Better Theory: In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

1. Nobody seems to think twice about "citric acid" being added to food products.
2. I went to school with a guy who ate vitamin C tablets by the handful. He had a cold the whole time I knew him.
3. I read somewhere once that almost everything you buy at the supermarket contains cornstarch. For one thing, it's used like talcum powder to keep your corn flakes from sticking together.
4. I wonder if eating a spoonful of butylated hydroxyanisole would hurt me. (Yes, I can spell it without looking it up.)
5. I should write a book of random thoughts. If it had "Food" in the title, it would sell a million copies.

The problem with the human machine is that it gets its fuel and parts from the same source. It's like your car trying to make new spark plugs out of gasoline. Things like fructose work well as fuel but they overload the parts-making equipment.If we were to eat like, say, Cro-Magnon man (assuming that our digestive systems haven't evolved much since then) we might be "healthy" in a parts-oriented sense but we'd have trouble getting enough fuel.The source of the problem is agriculture. Without it, we'd be healthy but dead.

You quoted me as saying I assume you do. Do we actually know that paleolithic hunter-gatherers were lactose-intolerant? As I understand it, the individual body loses the ability to digest lactose if it doesn't use that ability. Is there reason to think that the intolerance is inherited/evolved?My point about agriculture is that many agricultural products, especially grains, require processing - i.e. pre-digesting - before we can eat them in any quantity. That interference with the natural digestive process is the cause of a lot of our nutritional problems.We invented agriculture to make available more food (fuel) of kinds that are not easily digestible. To make them digestible, we have to process many of the nutrients out of them. I maintain that we'd be better off eating roots, berries and grubs - but there wouldn't be very many of us.Edited by ringo, : Changed "belief" to "think" - more sound both gramatically and doctrinally.

My first guess was that it was like lactation. When the mother stops nursing, she stops lactating. Similarly, I guessed, when the child stops nursing he stops producing lactase.But there does seem to be a genetic basis, which is not surprising. Fairly simple chemical events can become "enshrined" in genetics quite easily - as opposed to complex events such as a group of people "deciding" to consume milk from other species.

Soaking and fermenting would be one of the simplest forms of processing, suitable for use in cultures with simple technology. Sprouting of seeds is also good for the nutrient content as I understand it.Another simple method, crushing and grinding, is prone to having the wind blow away the lighter constituents. That may have given our ancestors the idea of throwing away the less palatable bits.