Listening to the debates about reforming health care just after reading Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food. What seems to be the elephant in the room, missing completely from the current health care debate, is any talk of how we are getting sick in the first place. According to Pollan, it’s what we eat. Two-thirds of medical expenses can be directly linked to what we eat and drink. From the description of his book on his website:
Most of what we’re consuming today is not food, and how we’re consuming it — in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone — is not really eating. Instead of food, we’re consuming “edible foodlike substances” — no longer the products of nature but of food science. Many of them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy. In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.
But if real food — the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food — stands in need of defense, from whom does it need defending? From the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other. Both stand to gain much from widespread confusion about what to eat, a question that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert help. Yet the professionalization of eating has failed to make Americans healthier. Thirty years of official nutritional advice has only made us sicker and fatter while ruining countless numbers of meals.
Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. By urging us to once again eat food, he challenges the prevailing nutrient-by-nutrient approach — what he calls nutritionism — and proposes an alternative way of eating that is informed by the traditions and ecology of real, well-grown, unprocessed food. Our personal health, he argues, cannot be divorced from the health of the food chains of which we are part.
I think the formulation, “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much,” is very powerful. Also — important for me — easy to remember.
I heard David Kessler, former head of the FDA, talking about his book “The End of Overeating.” He approaches the issue from a somewhat different direction, focusing on the physiological bases for way we eat and how those are exploited for modern food science. Sounds wonky, but I found it quite compelling. Here’s an hour of Kessler on KQED:
http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R907061000