blossom green

Here’s the gist of the Pollan article, I’m going to take his 9 points from the end of the article and post them here with my comments in italics.

1. Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.

I have nothing to add here and couldn’t agree more.  It’s actually what I would say exactly to a client when asked.  However, we do live in the real world and the occasional processed food is a reality in our lives.  Don’t become crazy trying to avoid everything either… its a balance I think.

2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They’re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best. Don’t forget that margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was more healthful than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks. When Kellogg’s can boast about its Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars, health claims have become hopelessly compromised. (The American Heart Association charges food makers for their endorsement.) Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.

I agree here as well.  Create your own health bars!  At least you will know whats in them!  utoh… I see a recipe coming soon to post on this blog…

3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number — or that contain high-fructose corn syrup.None of these characteristics are necessarily harmful in and of themselves, but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed.

Absolutely avoid high fructose corn syrup.  It is new on the scene and many health experts give it credit for contributing to our obesity crisis in America.  The obesity rates coincide directly with the introduction of high fructose corn syrup as well as processed vegetable oils on the scene since the 1970’s…

4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer’s market; you also won’t find food harvested long ago and far away. What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of nutritional quality. Precisely the kind of food your great-great-grandmother would have recognized as food.

I preach this regularly and you can find tons of resources on my web site for info on how to find these markets, and your local farmers in general.

5. Pay more, eat less. The American food system has for a century devoted its energies and policies to increasing quantity and reducing price, not to improving quality. There’s no escaping the fact that better food — measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often correspond) — costs more, because it has been grown or raised less intensively and with more care. Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is shameful, but most of us can: Americans spend, on average, less than 10 percent of their income on food, down from 24 percent in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation. And those of us who can afford to eat well should. Paying more for food well grown in good soils — whether certified organic or not — will contribute not only to your health (by reducing exposure to pesticides) but also to the health of others who might not themselves be able to afford that sort of food: the people who grow it and the people who live downstream, and downwind, of the farms where it is grown.

Cheap food?  Better equate that with poisoned bodies and environments.  The big picture of cheap food is bleak.  Pollan is right, equate the real costs of what you are buying and we should be paying more for quality.  Those small farmers aren’t getting rich guys… and you know, I wish they were.  They deserve it for saving our food supply and our environment.  Not the Monsanto’s of the world who ARE getting rich. 

“Eat less” is the most unwelcome advice of all, but in fact the scientific case for eating a lot less than we currently do is compelling. “Calorie restriction” has repeatedly been shown to slow aging in animals, and many researchers (including Walter Willett, the Harvard epidemiologist) believe it offers the single strongest link between diet and cancer prevention. Food abundance is a problem, but culture has helped here, too, by promoting the idea of moderation. Once one of the longest-lived people on earth, the Okinawans practiced a principle they called “Hara Hachi Bu”: eat until you are 80 percent full. To make the “eat less” message a bit more palatable, consider that quality may have a bearing on quantity: I don’t know about you, but the better the quality of the food I eat, the less of it I need to feel satisfied. All tomatoes are not created equal.

Here, Pollan and I part ways.  Look, women have been avoiding food in America for as long as anyone started objectifying us, and especially since the age of mass marketing.  I think he misses the point here when he says to eat less. 

Eat less of the processed junk, yes.  Eat MORE of the good un-processed foods.  I think we have become a society of fat phobic, and frankly food phobic people.  For good reason, its true.  But as a chef and nutritionist I am concerned that we are losing our love for real whole FABULOUS food. 

More diets aren’t the answer.

6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Scientists may disagree on what’s so good about plants — the antioxidants? Fiber? Omega-3s? — but they do agree that they’re probably really good for you and certainly can’t hurt. Also, by eating a plant-based diet, you’ll be consuming far fewer calories, since plant foods (except seeds) are typically less “energy dense” than the other things you might eat. Vegetarians are healthier than carnivores, but near vegetarians (“flexitarians”) are as healthy as vegetarians. Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he advised treating meat more as a flavoring than a food.

I agree and disagree with him here as well.  YES, most people need to eat a lot more veggies.  It’s true.  But the vegetarian diet is being based against a meat based diet from Factory farmed meats… meats that are not healthy to eat.  Foods fed to factory farmed animals are not what the animals are meant to eat, they are meant to fatten the animal quick for market, and are cheap for producers.  Things like grains, corn especially, soy, other animal by-products- responsible for mad cow disease- are NOT what cows are supposed to eat.  Cows eat green grass.  They need to graze to be healthy, and for us to be healthy eating them.

I’m not down with all the logic of the vegetarian argument anymore.  I was for most of my adult life.  I agree with most of the argument, but don’t think it is complete.  For more information I urge you to read some of the books mentioned at the my web site under ‘resources’ or go to:  www.westonaprice.org.

And to quote Jefferson… my goodness.  We can quote great minds all day long to promote our points, I’m fond of doing it myself.  But that doesn’t make them right or perfect to emulate for everyone.  Ghandi, Einstein, who else were vegetarian?  These are modern men who were radical thinkers in their own way, as often vegetarians are.  (People who think critically and are protesting things about their society via diet as one example).  I am right there with them, disagreeing with a lot of the way food is produced and many other things about our times.  But I do think there is another way than vegetarianism to protest if you will.  But this does digress slightly… more later. 

7. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren’t a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn’t still be around. True, food cultures are embedded in societies and economies and ecologies, and some of them travel better than others: Inuit not so well as Italian. In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats, as well as to what it eats. In the case of the French paradox, it may not be the dietary nutrients that keep the French healthy (lots of saturated fat and alcohol?!) so much as the dietary habits: small portions, no seconds or snacking, communal meals — and the serious pleasure taken in eating. (Worrying about diet can’t possibly be good for you.) Let culture be your guide, not science.

And here Pollan is 100% on track in my opinion.  Funny that he doesn’t seem to know that these tradtional diets included lots of animal foods, of course produced naturally without all the junk being done to animals today, and using the entire animal as opposed to just certain parts we deem acceptable to eat. These traditional diets included many other features including eating real healthful fats, and cultured foods to aid in digestion.  Lessons in eating that we have all but lost in our modern world.   For more information I refer you to my resources section of my web site, and one book in particular:  ‘Traditional Foods are your Best Medicine’ by Ronald Schmid, ND.  (who by the way started his own small farm based on all he learned about traditional food ways). Also, ‘Wild Fermentation’ by Sandor Katz.

8. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden. To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for our sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be cheap and easy; that food is fuel and not communion. The culture of the kitchen, as embodied in those enduring traditions we call cuisines, contains more wisdom about diet and health than you are apt to find in any nutrition journal or journalism. Plus, the food you grow yourself contributes to your health long before you sit down to eat it. So you might want to think about putting down this article now and picking up a spatula or hoe.

Yes, he’s right again.  I agree, we can’t be healthy without cooking for ourselves… And I’m here to help you as a chef!  Cook, cook, cook!  Yes.  Farm, farm, farm…

9. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases. That of course is an argument from nutritionism, but there is a better one, one that takes a broader view of “health.” Biodiversity in the diet means less monoculture in the fields. What does that have to do with your health? Everything. The vast monocultures that now feed us require tremendous amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to keep from collapsing. Diversifying those fields will mean fewer chemicals, healthier soils, healthier plants and animals and, in turn, healthier people. It’s all connected, which is another way of saying that your health isn’t bordered by your body and that what’s good for the soil is probably good for you, too.

Absolutely critical in saving our food systems.  Biodiversity.  And yes, we are omnivores. Eat some quality, properly raised animal foods, avoid factory farmed, support the small farmers, support the environment.