archive for January 2nd, 2008

The jury is in: A review of Michael Pollan’s “In Defense of Food”

by Bonnie P. @ Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008.

“In Defense of Food” does more than merely stick up for the produce section: it mounts a damning attack on this diet, which in Pollan’s assessment is “a radical and at least in evolutionary terms, abrupt set of changes over the course of the last 150 years, not just to our foodstuffs but also to our food relationships, all the way from the soil to the meal.”… This is huge, evolutionarily speaking, writes Pollan: Of all the changes to our food system that go under the heading “the Western Diet,” the shift from a food chain with green plants at its base to one based on seeds may be the most far reaching of all…. “The food industry needs theories so it can better redesign specific processed foods; a new theory means a new line of products, allowing the industry to go on tweaking the Western diet instead of making any more radical change to its business model,” Pollan writes…. And while he for the most part acknowledges when he resorts to the familiar “good nutrient, bad nutrient” jargon, he could have emphasized more in the section on omega-3 fatty acids that, while the food industry is jumping on the bandwagon for this current It nutrient, whole foods like salmon that naturally contain it have far lower levels when fed unnatural diets from, you guessed it, grains…. He doesn’t mention that not only does Ames believe that deficiencies in micronutrient may be behind obesity — positing the very interesting hypothesis that “a body starved of critical nutrients will keep eating in the hope of obtaining them” — but like all good nutritionists, he is hard at work on identifying and developing artificial versions of those missing micronutrients.

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