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.
Showing posts with label What Should We Eat?. Show all posts
Showing posts with label What Should We Eat?. Show all posts
Monday, November 22, 2010
Sunday, November 21, 2010
AN EATER'S MANIFESTO #3
By now you're probably feeling the cognitive dissonance of the supermarket shopper or science: section reader as well as some nostalgia for the simplicity and solidity of the fist few words of this book. Words I'm still prepared to defend against the shifting winds of nutritional science and food-industry marketing, and will. But before I do, it's important to understand how we arrived at our present state of nutritional confusion and anxiety. That is the subject of the fist portion of this book; "The Age of Nutritionism."
The story of how the most basic questions about what to eat ever got so complicated reveals a great deal about the institutional imperatives of the food industry nutrition science, and---ahern---journalism, three parties that stand to gain much from widespread confusion surrounding the most elemental question an omnivore confronts. But human deciding what to eat without professional guidance- something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees-is seriously unprofitable if you're a food company, a definite career loser if you're a nutritionist, and just plain boring if you're a newspaper editor or reporter. (Or, for that matter, an eater. Who wants to hear, yet again, that you should ”eat more fruits and vegetables"?) And so like a large gray cloud, a great Conspiracy of Scientific Complexity has gathered around the simplest questions of nutrition-much to the advantage of everyone involved. Except perhaps the supposed beneficiary of all this nutritional advice: us, and our health and happiness as eaters. For the most important thing to know about the campaign to professionalize dietary advice is that it has not made us any healthier. To the contrary: As I argue in part one, most of the nutritional advice we've received over the last half century (and in particular the advice to replace the fats in our diets with carbohydrates) has actually made us less healthy and considerably fatter.
My aim in this book is to help us reclaim our health and happiness as eaters. To do this requires an exercise that might at fist blush seem unnecessary if not absurd: to offer a defense of food and the eating thereof. That food and eating stand in need of a defense might seem counterintuitive at a time when "over-nutrition" is emerging as a more serious threat to public health than under-nutrition. But I contend that most of what We're consuming today is no longer, strictly speaking, food at al, and how we're consuming it-in the ca, in front of the TV and, increasingly, alone-is not really eating, at least not in the sense that civilization has long understood the term. Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savain, the eighteenth-century gastronomist, drew a useful distinction between the alimentary activity of animals, which "feed," and humans, who eat, or die, a practice, he suggested, that owes as much to culture as it does to biology.
But if food and eating stand in need of a defense, from whom, or what, do they need defending? From nutrition science on one side and from the food industry on the other-and from the needless complications around eating that together they have fostered. As eaters we find ourselves increasingly in the grip of a Nutritional Industrial Complex-comprised of well-meaning, if error-prone, scientists and food marketers only too eager to exploit every shift in the nutritional consensus. Together, and with some crucial help from the government, they have constructed an ideology of nutritionism that, among other things, has convinced us of thee pernicious myths: that what matters most is not the food but the "nutrient"; that because nutrients are invisible and incomprehensible to everyone but scientists, we need expert help in deciding what to eat; and that the purpose of eating is to promote a narrow concept of physical health. Because food in this view is foremost a matter of biology, it follows that we must try to eat "scientifically"---by the nutrient and the number and under the guidance of experts.
If such an approach to food doesn't strike you as the least bit strange, that is probably because nutritionist thing has become so pervasive as to be invisible. We forget that, historically, people have eaten for a great many reasons other than biological necessity. Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been tag meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.
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/
The story of how the most basic questions about what to eat ever got so complicated reveals a great deal about the institutional imperatives of the food industry nutrition science, and---ahern---journalism, three parties that stand to gain much from widespread confusion surrounding the most elemental question an omnivore confronts. But human deciding what to eat without professional guidance- something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees-is seriously unprofitable if you're a food company, a definite career loser if you're a nutritionist, and just plain boring if you're a newspaper editor or reporter. (Or, for that matter, an eater. Who wants to hear, yet again, that you should ”eat more fruits and vegetables"?) And so like a large gray cloud, a great Conspiracy of Scientific Complexity has gathered around the simplest questions of nutrition-much to the advantage of everyone involved. Except perhaps the supposed beneficiary of all this nutritional advice: us, and our health and happiness as eaters. For the most important thing to know about the campaign to professionalize dietary advice is that it has not made us any healthier. To the contrary: As I argue in part one, most of the nutritional advice we've received over the last half century (and in particular the advice to replace the fats in our diets with carbohydrates) has actually made us less healthy and considerably fatter.
My aim in this book is to help us reclaim our health and happiness as eaters. To do this requires an exercise that might at fist blush seem unnecessary if not absurd: to offer a defense of food and the eating thereof. That food and eating stand in need of a defense might seem counterintuitive at a time when "over-nutrition" is emerging as a more serious threat to public health than under-nutrition. But I contend that most of what We're consuming today is no longer, strictly speaking, food at al, and how we're consuming it-in the ca, in front of the TV and, increasingly, alone-is not really eating, at least not in the sense that civilization has long understood the term. Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savain, the eighteenth-century gastronomist, drew a useful distinction between the alimentary activity of animals, which "feed," and humans, who eat, or die, a practice, he suggested, that owes as much to culture as it does to biology.
But if food and eating stand in need of a defense, from whom, or what, do they need defending? From nutrition science on one side and from the food industry on the other-and from the needless complications around eating that together they have fostered. As eaters we find ourselves increasingly in the grip of a Nutritional Industrial Complex-comprised of well-meaning, if error-prone, scientists and food marketers only too eager to exploit every shift in the nutritional consensus. Together, and with some crucial help from the government, they have constructed an ideology of nutritionism that, among other things, has convinced us of thee pernicious myths: that what matters most is not the food but the "nutrient"; that because nutrients are invisible and incomprehensible to everyone but scientists, we need expert help in deciding what to eat; and that the purpose of eating is to promote a narrow concept of physical health. Because food in this view is foremost a matter of biology, it follows that we must try to eat "scientifically"---by the nutrient and the number and under the guidance of experts.
If such an approach to food doesn't strike you as the least bit strange, that is probably because nutritionist thing has become so pervasive as to be invisible. We forget that, historically, people have eaten for a great many reasons other than biological necessity. Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been tag meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.
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/
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