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Author Topic:   A Better Theory: In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
Percy
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Posts: 22390
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


(1)
Message 1 of 78 (698334)
05-05-2013 3:09 PM


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

Replies to this message:
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nwr
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Posts: 6408
From: Geneva, Illinois
Joined: 08-08-2005
Member Rating: 5.1


Message 2 of 78 (698335)
05-05-2013 3:27 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by Percy
05-05-2013 3:09 PM


Ironically it is the increased focus on nutrition, what Pollan calls nutritionism, that is largely responsible for our current plight.
I doubt that.
Nutritionism is the selection of food based on its nutrition label.
Most people don't look at the nutrition label.
Yes, I look at those labels. But I mainly pay attention to sodium, which I try to keep down.
3. Avoid foods with any ingredients you can't pronounce.
If we follow the implied suggestion of not reading the nutrition label, we probably won't run into names that we 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.
If diet soda is counted as food, then this would not be much of a surprise.
Color me unimpressed.

Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity

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 Message 3 by Percy, posted 05-05-2013 6:17 PM nwr has replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22390
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 3 of 78 (698340)
05-05-2013 6:17 PM
Reply to: Message 2 by nwr
05-05-2013 3:27 PM


nwr writes:
3. Avoid foods with any ingredients you can't pronounce.
If we follow the implied suggestion of not reading the nutrition label, we probably won't run into names that we can't pronounce.
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:
  1. Avoid foods that make health claims.
--Percy

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nwr
Member
Posts: 6408
From: Geneva, Illinois
Joined: 08-08-2005
Member Rating: 5.1


Message 4 of 78 (698341)
05-05-2013 6:56 PM
Reply to: Message 3 by Percy
05-05-2013 6:17 PM


I just remembered another hint:
Avoid foods that make health claims.
I agree with that. Well, maybe I would change it to "be suspicious of health claims for foods."

Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity

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Faith 
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Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 5 of 78 (698356)
05-05-2013 11:08 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by Percy
05-05-2013 3:09 PM


Overall I agree with you, glad to hear about a book that defends plain old real food.
Enjoy your anniversary feast. Hope you're going to the best restaurant in town.

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Jon
Inactive Member


Message 6 of 78 (698359)
05-05-2013 11:49 PM


Is there a problem of severe malnourishment in the general population?

Love your enemies!

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Percy
Member
Posts: 22390
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


(1)
Message 7 of 78 (698366)
05-06-2013 7:49 AM
Reply to: Message 6 by Jon
05-05-2013 11:49 PM


Jon writes:
Is there a problem of severe malnourishment in the general population?
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

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Taq
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Posts: 9970
Joined: 03-06-2009
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(1)
Message 8 of 78 (698399)
05-06-2013 5:29 PM


Folksy Talk Dressed in Common Sense
The science nazi in me tends to bristle in discussions like these. For example, the claim that you shouldn't eat anything with ingredients you can't pronounce. That is a bit of folksy talk, and it is pretending to be "common sense", and we know how common sense can fail in the extreme.
For example, I bet I could list 20 chemicals found in naturally growing, organically raised, pesticide free apples that most people would not recognize. Just the TCA cycle by itself includes fumarate and a few other carbohydrates that are foreign to most people. If anything, the processing of food REDUCES the number of complex and hard to pronounce chemicals naturally found in food. On top of that, how many people can even pronounce all of the chemicals found in vitamin pills?
What I think has changed most over recent human history is just the availability of food and the increase in sedentary lifestyles. I doubt that a large number of our ancestors had 3 square meals a day just a short car drive away.

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Percy
Member
Posts: 22390
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 9 of 78 (698417)
05-06-2013 9:08 PM
Reply to: Message 8 by Taq
05-06-2013 5:29 PM


Re: Folksy Talk Dressed in Common Sense
Taq writes:
The science nazi in me tends to bristle in discussions like these. For example, the claim that you shouldn't eat anything with ingredients you can't pronounce. That is a bit of folksy talk, and it is pretending to be "common sense", and we know how common sense can fail in the extreme.
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?
For example, I bet I could list 20 chemicals found in naturally growing, organically raised, pesticide free apples that most people would not recognize.
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

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Rahvin
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Joined: 07-01-2005
Member Rating: 9.2


Message 10 of 78 (698420)
05-06-2013 9:24 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by Percy
05-05-2013 3:09 PM


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.
I cannot begin to describe the amount of skepticism spawned by this summary alone.
If we have no idea what's going on, really no idea, then why should I choose any one food over another? Why shouldn't my diet just consist of Cheetos?
And what's "real food," anyway? I'm sure everyone agrees that imaginary food isn't going to help anyone, so that must not be the distinction. How can I tell "real" from "fake?" Imitation crab may be fake crab, but it's real (nasty, disgusting, horrible) fish.
If you can give even the most basic advice over which foods to choose and which to avoid, you have to have some kind of method for making those distinctions, even if the real system being used is "foods in an orange box" or "foods I think taste horrible." Claiming that "we" have "no idea whats going on" and then making a suggestion is a flat contradiction.
That tells me this guy is just jumping on the bandwagon of, essentially, the "caveman" diet and similar fad programs. They may be right, they may be wrong, but this is a terrible argument either way.

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. - Francis Bacon
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. — Albert Camus
"...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." - Barash, David 1995.

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Jon
Inactive Member


Message 11 of 78 (698428)
05-06-2013 10:28 PM
Reply to: Message 7 by Percy
05-06-2013 7:49 AM


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.
What are they eating though?
Is it because they are eating all that fertilized corn or because they are eating all those processed corn chips?
Even if the corn had all its original nutrients in it, would it really matter when the kids aren't eating the stuff anyway unless its been processed, oiled, greased, and salted?
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.
But what are we measuring? Changes in the nutritional value of the base crop or changes in the nutritional value of the stuff that goes into people's mouths?
If people didn't eat McDonalds and Pringles all day, I really don't think they would be still fat and of poor health just because the nutritional value of corn has generally gone down through the years.
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.
Sounds good. Whatever is in the corn (or isn't in the corn) it's better for you than what's in the corn chips.
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.
We are a society of chemicals. I was doing some random surfing the other day and came across a claim that testosterone levels are decreasing in the population with each generationlikely from increased exposure to poisonous chemicals in food packaging.
So where do we go with this? Even with my processed food, disrupted endocrine system, and who knows what else I still chance to live longer than folks in developing societies. It would be good to get a handle on these problems, but even if we don't, is the tradeoff not still worth it?
Jon

Love your enemies!

This message is a reply to:
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Percy
Member
Posts: 22390
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


(1)
Message 12 of 78 (698429)
05-06-2013 10:50 PM
Reply to: Message 10 by Rahvin
05-06-2013 9:24 PM


Rahvin writes:
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.
I cannot begin to describe the amount of skepticism spawned by this summary alone.
If we have no idea what's going on, really no idea, then why should I choose any one food over another? Why shouldn't my diet just consist of Cheetos?
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

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Percy
Member
Posts: 22390
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


(1)
Message 13 of 78 (698431)
05-06-2013 11:17 PM
Reply to: Message 11 by Jon
05-06-2013 10:28 PM


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.
So where do we go with this? Even with my processed food, disrupted endocrine system, and who knows what else I still chance to live longer than folks in developing societies. It would be good to get a handle on these problems, but even if we don't, is the tradeoff not still worth it?
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

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Jon
Inactive Member


Message 14 of 78 (698440)
05-07-2013 12:44 AM
Reply to: Message 13 by Percy
05-06-2013 11:17 PM


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.
I think this is a matter of other problems, some food related. I don't think that the drop in nutritional level for base crops is the driving force behind low longevity in the U.S. when compared to other countries.
On the food side, I think getting people to switch to diets of regular foods (as you say Pollan suggests) and getting away from processed and fast food is about the best we can do.
Why won't that fix things?
Are the nutritional shortcomings of base crops so great that the food can't do its job anymore?

Love your enemies!

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xongsmith
Member
Posts: 2578
From: massachusetts US
Joined: 01-01-2009
Member Rating: 6.8


Message 15 of 78 (698445)
05-07-2013 3:19 AM
Reply to: Message 6 by Jon
05-05-2013 11:49 PM


Jon asks:
Is there a problem of severe malnourishment in the general population?
...yes. Look how we vote. Look at the scholastic standings against the rest of civilization. Yes. Houston, we have a problem.

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