In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
by Michael Pollan
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Book Reviews of In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
Book Review: Pithy and Powerful
Summary: 4 Stars
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants", writes Pollan. It's been a few weeks since I read the book and I still remember that. Words to live by. The book expands on those simple sentences in the subsequent chapters. The book is short and well-written, and dare I say, life changing? I was already a fairly healthful eater, but now my consciousness has been raised a bit more, and I am seriously focusing on "eating food". The book suggests not eating anything that has more than 5 ingredients or has ingredients you don't recognize. I have been reading package labels much more closely now, and have been forced to abandon the cereal bar that I used to eat each morning in my car on the way to work. And that is another point he makes - why are we Americans always eating on the run? I also just switched from skim to whole milk after learning how harmful the processing of skim milk is. Whole milk tastes better anyway! Another good point he makes is that healthful food sometimes may cost more, but in the long run, if the food keeps you healthy, it pays off.
There wasn't really that much in the book that I hadn't read or heard before, but the way Pollan pulls it all together makes it impactful. So much of our culture and lifestyle seems to work against healthful eating, but this book has given me new resolve to try harder. I believe this book will motivate most readers to make some changes in their eating habits.
Book Review: Fellow Vegetarians...check it out
Summary: 4 Stars
Somewhat of a simplified The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Pollan's latest is still an eye opener. As a long time vegetarian, I have long been answering the "Where do you get your protein?" question, and consider myself well informed about food and nutrition in general, but I'm always open to learning a little more. When the author raised the issue of "Nutritionism", he really caught my interest. I've never looked at food through this particular lens before, and I was hooked! I realized that by accepting the reductionist perspective of nutrients, I was being subtly weaned way from my decades long dedication to whole foods. By juggling the nutritional claims of some processed food producers and their spokepeople, I had gradually begun to eat nutrients rather than foods, all the while continuing to be vegetarian. Pollan's "Nutritionism" arguments made me re-evaluate some of the creeping commercialism that had crept into my diet via the new approach to nutrition since 1977, when the meat industry co-opted the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs and redefined the debates on diet by focusing on nutrients rather than foods. By all means, read the book and stop and take stock of how your vegetarian diet may have been subverted without your realizing it.Book Review: Everything you know about food is wrong. So is everything the lunch lady knows.
Summary: 4 Stars
Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food illustrates how poorly understood the field of food science is and ignorance corrupts our eating habits. Scientists try to reduce everything down to soil to their essential few components and then build "nutrients" -- not "food" -- accordingly. Soil is reduced to just potassium, phosphorous and nitrogen. The plants that soil produces suffer from a lack of nutritional diversity, and then the meat animals that eat those plants do as well. To compensate, scientists sprinkle on top whatever nutrients are popular at the moments and market it as "healthy" "food".
The big problem, Pollan shows, is that a lot of the benefits in food exist in the synergy between many food elements coming together, rather than in the right combination of five or so ingredients. To function properly, the human body needs an astonishing amount of different compounds, the spectrum of which are available in common food has been severely limited by the industrialization of production. Whereas in previous generations, many varieties of crops were planted and consumed, now industrialization has led to convergence. The dominant crops were selected for their ability to produce, not nutritional value, and the fact that they are always in season means that the usual shifts in diets are stabilized to a few homogeneous crops.
Continued at: [...]
Book Review: a hodgepodge
Summary: 3 Stars
A hodgepodge of reasonable advice and contradictory confusion.
Example: p.164 "Vegetarians are less susceptible to most of the Western diseases, and as a consequence live longer."
p. 165 (next page!) "I haven't found a compelling reason to exclude [meat] from the diet."
This, even after citing The China Study by Cornell nutrionist T. Colin Campbell, which makes a strong scientific case for vegetarianism.
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p. 172 "Be the kind of person who would take supplements, and then save your money." (Because controlled studies show that most supplements don't appear to work)
This is the opposite of the approach he takes with traditional diets. There he says, traditional diets work and we don't know why so follow a traditional diet. But with supplement takers he says it works and we don't know why so don't follow exactly what they do.
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He thinks that traditional diets work because they have stood the test of time. But so have all kinds of religious superstitions that we know are simply false. (If you're traditionally religious, just consider the falsehoods in other religions that have "stood the test of time.")
So while the basic advice of "Eat food. Mostly Plants. Not too much." is excellent. Too much of the elaboration is mixed up.
Book Review: A great case for changing the way we eat, and entertaining too
Summary: 5 Stars
As someone who already buys organic, avoids the center aisles of the grocery store and heads to the farmer's market whenever possible, I wondered whether I would really gain anything from this book. While Michael Pollan's overall message is not new to me, many of the reasons Michael puts forth to support this message are.
For instance, I never realized that organic produce is not just chemical-free, it's also higher in most measured micronutrients PLUS some of the plants own defenses against pests (polyphenols and carotenoids) also help the human body fight inflammation and aging. Naturally, when we spray plants with pesticides, they need, and therefore produce, fewer of these compounds.
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. This philosophy is based on good science, logic and the clear empirical evidence that our diet is making us sick. Michael build a strong case, and then provides some clea, concise rules of thumb to help us get back to old ways of eating without selling our house and moving back to the farm. Along the way, he's full of tongue-in-cheek remarks that had me laughing out loud (like another good rule of thumb for how to distinguish between food and the thousands of other foodlike substances sold in the supermarket - "Never eat food that's incapable of rotting")