A Better Theory: In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

Percy writes: Stay away from Cheerios. They steal your money. Dont buy GMO. Dont buy anything you see on TV.We are under a massive attack from Monsanto, et al.Don't buy Nestle anything, don't buy any major brand at all - they are all ripping you off. That is what they are taught to do! Buy your home-made bread from your mom & pop store. KNOW who made your food personally. Face to face, neighborly. The smaller the business is, the better you will have a good relationship with it.

If you want to get away from processed foods and like those snack bars, they're really easy to make for yourself. Just google Homemade Snack Bars. You can put in your own choice of nuts and fruits and oats or other grains, honey or other sweeteners, nut butters, even chocolate chips etc etc etc. No artificial additives that way.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Pollan doesn't think so either. The point meant to be conveyed was that the influence of the food industry is so pervasive and powerful that they have even influenced the nutritional content of crops, so one can just imagine how much damage they have done to the nutritional content of more processed foods. Yes, that's Pollan's message. His basic dietary advice is to eat food (as opposed to processed foods), mostly vegetables. He suggests purchasing meat and produce from local farmers, the more local the better. He really likes the idea of a home garden.--Percy

One thing Pollan mentions is that the amount people eat is inversely proportional to the effort to prepare the food. Perhaps we're only willing to invest so much total time in preparing and eating a meal, and the more time we spend preparing the less time we'll spend eating.I like the idea of making our own snack bars. My wife's the cook in the house, I'll see if she's interested.--Percy

I am not aware of any processed food that causes extreme harm. However, I am aware of naturally growing plants that can flat out kill you if you eat them. They are poisonous in the extreme. That's kind of my point. The whole foods get a pass. While this may be for good reason, that reason still needs to be worked out. Are the whole foods in the bar doing as much harm as the additives? Again, the constant assumption is that artificial is bad, natural is good. But is this true?

Oh, I see, you're questioning the proposition that whole foods are healthier than processed foods, and that traditional diets are healthier than the western style diet. Well, as I said, nutrition researchers don't have the ability to study a vast dichotomy of substances operating in concert in the human digestive track at the same time. What they have is the ability to study one substance at a time in isolation. Obviously the results using this approach are not good, as the diminished health of societies on western style diets attests. One can wait for the scientific capabilities of nutrition researchers to improve to the point where they can describe just what whole foods are doing that individual substances all combined together in a factory do not do, or one can accept that we aren't capable of this level of detail at the current time and simply behave prudently given the data we do have: don't follow a western style diet.One thing that has been observed over and over again is that when people abandon a traditional diet for a western style diet that they soon begin experiencing the diseases of western civilization, namely heart disease and diabetes. Pollan describes an Australian study that for a seven week period returned 10 bush people living in the city, all with type 2 diabetes, to the bush where they returned to their traditional diet and experienced dramatic improvements to their health: --PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

I'm faced with the problem that I live in a Czech-speaking country, and thus am completely unable to pronounce the word for asparagus. 'Maltodextrin', however, is the same as in English, and thus causes me no problems.On a more serious note, I'm failing to see what's interesting or new about this book, from the summary given. It seems the advice is the same as that consistently given by nutritionists for as long as the discipline has existed - to avoid processed foods and eat a balanced diet. What am I missing?

I think Taq was questioning the assumption that natural must invariably be better and processed always bad. I don't think anyone is defending what you have called the'Western diet' over traditional diets. Processed food in the Western diet has been processed to maximise consumption in order to maximise profit. It panders to our evolutionary inbuilt desire for sweet, salty and fatty foods with the over-arching aim of keeping production costs down and consumption high in order to maximise profit.If we were to produce processed food with the aim of maximising nutritional value and needs rather than desires and profit it might lead to a different result in terms of processed food being unhealthy.I'm not suggesting this is remotely likely. I'm just defending the idea that we can/should question the processed = bad position.

Any food that has high fructose corn syrup is killing you - and HFCS is found in most processed foods. You need only Google processed food to see how harmful they are.Not to mention, their nutritional value is shit. Consuming raw foods or close to the farm foods, and also grass fed meat, increases your nutritional intake while lowering your caloric intake. The reverse is true for consuming processed foods - more calories less nutritional value.Example:
White bread sandwich with processed lunch meat, a bag of potato chips, a can of soda and a chocolate bar as dessert is a typical lunch for people. Those calories have barely any nutritional value.Instead of that, you have two apples (locally grown) and you have less calories and much more nutritional value. It's all your body needs really. If you train your body to eat less calories, but, those calories are coming from foods with a high nutritional value, it will work better and be healthier. Your body doesn't just need calories, it needs healthy calories.In America we consume a lot of empty calories - calories with barely any nutritional value. So we are fatties and unhealthy because we don't get enough vitamins and nutrients.- Oni

That depends obviously. If apples are sprayed with pesticides and given who knows what kind of chemicals to grow faster, then I'd say both are equally bad.But even then, the nutritinal value of the natural, raw state of the pesticide sprayed fruit is better than anything processed - that rarely has any nutritional value. I wouldn't eat it because of the pesticides but it would yield more nutrients.Ideally you should eat locally grown, pesitcide free, chemical free and hormone free fruits, veggies and meat. Also, to maximize the nutritional value of the food, keep it as raw as possible (except of course for chicken and pork).- Oni

Studies? So if we took vitamins to make up for the lack of nutritional value would this eliminate the harm caused by processed foods? I personally think that it is the calories that are causing the most harm, regardless of where those calories come from.

The interesting contradiction of processed foods is that they're being increasingly promoted as healthy simply because certain vitamins and minerals have been added. For example, Frito Lay claims their chips are "Heart Healthy" because of their use of corn oil (instead of whatever they used to use). Corn oil is not usually thought of as a health food, but under current FDA rules for what they call "qualified" health statements, Frito Lay gets to print "Heart Healthy" in big letters on their packaging with a tiny asterisk at the bottom saying: Gotta love that fine print!Anyway, the evidence that *is* available should lead one to strongly doubt that simply adding the vitamins and minerals to processed food that we know exist in real food will produce a healthy population, and then there are all the substances in food we don't yet know are important or haven't even discovered yet. Twenty years ago who was worried about omega-3? Ten years from now some new substance will have health primacy, at least in the minds of nutrition researchers and food marketeers.--Percy

It's not killing you any more so than other sugars, according to research by J.S. White (2013).ReferencesWhite, J.S., 2013. Challenging the fructose hypothesis: new perspectives on fructose consumption and metabolism. Adv Nutr. 4(2), 246-56.

1. Nobody seems to think twice about "citric acid" being added to food products.
2. I went to school with a guy who ate vitamin C tablets by the handful. He had a cold the whole time I knew him.
3. I read somewhere once that almost everything you buy at the supermarket contains cornstarch. For one thing, it's used like talcum powder to keep your corn flakes from sticking together.
4. I wonder if eating a spoonful of butylated hydroxyanisole would hurt me. (Yes, I can spell it without looking it up.)
5. I should write a book of random thoughts. If it had "Food" in the title, it would sell a million copies.

Plenty of them - just Google high fructose corn syrup in lab ratsHere's a few things on it: SourceSourceSourceDo you really think it doesn't harm you? There's a few problems with that. First you're still consuming a lot of calories, refined sugars, HFCS, and empty carbs that turn to fat, leads to obesity, etc. And we all know the issues one has if this is the lifestyle you choose to live - heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, to say the least. No amount of vitamins will help you change that.Also, the over the counter vitamins you get a GNC or Vitamin World are usually crap. By the time your body processes it you're not getting much other than a very expensive pee. But, I know guys who love vitamins, however, they consume upwards of around 80 pills a day.Just eat two apples, they taste good. You eat 4000 calories of processed foods, with refined sugars, carbs, and HFCS - and I'll eat 4000 calories of veggies and grass fed beef.Who do you think will have the health issues?- Oni