AN EATER'S MANIFESTO #4

That eating should be foremost about bodily health is a relatively new and, I think, destructive idea-destructive not just of the pleasure of eating, which would be bad enough, but paradoxically of our health as well. Indeed, no people on earth worry more about the health consequences of their food choices than we Americans do-and no people suffer from as many diet-related health problems. We are becoming a nation of orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating. *

The scientists haven't tested the hypothesis yet, but I'm willing to bet that when they do they'll find an inverse correlation between the amount of tie people spend worrying about nutrition and their overall health and happiness. This is, after all, the implicit lesson of the French paradox, so-called not by the French (Quel paradoxe?) but by American nutritionists, who can't fathom how a people who enjoy their food as much as the French do, and blithely eat so many nutrients deemed toxic by nutritionists, could have substantially lower rates of heart disease than we do on our elaborately engineered low-fat diets. Maybe it's tie we confronted the American paradox: a notably unhealthy population preoccupied with nutrition and diet and the idea of eating healthily.

I don't mean to suggest that al would be well if we could just stop worrying about food or the state of our dietary health: Let them eat Twinkies! There are in fact some very good reasons to worry. The rise of nutritionism reflects legitimate concerns that the American diet, which is well on its way to becoming the world's diet, has changed in ways that are making us increasingly sick and fat. Four of the top ten causes of death today are chronic diseases with well-established list to diet: coronary heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer. Yes, the rise to prominence of these chronic diseases is partly due to the fact that we're not dying earlier in life of infectious diseases, but only partly: Even after adjusting for age, many of the so-called diseases of civilization were far less common a century ago-and they remain rare in places where people don't eat the way we do.

I'm speaking, of course, of the elephant in the room whenever we discuss diet and health: "the Western diet." This is the subject of the second part of the book, in which I follow the story of the most radical change to the way humans eat since the discovery of agriculture. Al of our uncertainties about nutrition
should not obscure the plain fact that the chronic diseases that now kill most of us ca be traced directly to the industrialization of our food: the rise of highly processed foods and refined grains; the use of chemicals to raise plants and animals in huge monocultures; the superabundance of cheap calories of sugar and fat produced by modern agriculture; and the narrowing of the biological diversity of the human diet to a tiny handful of staple crops, notably wheat, corn, and soy. These changes have given us the Western diet that we take for granted: lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything-except vegetables, fruits, and whole grains.

In Defense of Food
Author: Michael Pollan

http://michaelpollan.com/books/in-defense-of-food/

http://www.depsyl.com/

http://back2basicnutrition.com/

http://bionutritionalresearch.olhblogspace.com/

*Ortorexa-from the Greek "orth-" (right and correct) + "orexa" (appetite) = right appetite. The term was fist proposed in 1996 by the America physician Steven Bratman. Though orthorexia is not yet an eating disorder recognized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, academic investigation is under way.