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Diets, Farewell
How to dodge the forces that keep us fat, learn to enjoy our food more and probably slim down in the process.
By Colette Bancroft, Times Book Editor
Published December 30, 2007
In a few days, millions of Americans will snap out of a couple of months of holiday indulgence and vow to eat healthily. They'll troll the bookstores and Internet for the latest hot diet that offers a plan so intricate and rigorous they can believe it will work a miracle. They'll pore over nutrition labels and calorie counts like scholars over ancient scrolls, trying to winkle out the wisdom of nutritional science. As a nation, we've been doing that for three decades. And we're fatter than ever. Less healthy, too. What's going on here? Michael Pollan explains it all for you in his new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. His advice for a healthy diet is so concise it's on the cover of the book: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Pollan, a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine and the Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley, spent much of the past year on the bestseller lists with The Omnivore's Dilemma. That book was a beautifully written - and often terrifying - journey through the industrial food chain, as well as a visit to some of the alternatives to it. Much of The Omnivore's Dilemma was about how not to eat; In Defense of Food, a slimmer book, is about eating well. Pollan's advice: Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. He explains that human beings are remarkably adaptable about food. Across human history and cultures, we have thrived on a wide variety of diets. Some groups have been vegetarians, others have eaten almost nothing but meat or fish, still others have come up with almost every combination of foodstuffs imaginable - and most of them have done just fine, as long as they could get enough of whatever they were eating. But Pollan traces two unprecedented occurrences of the 20th century: the rise of what he calls "nutritionism," or the scientific study of food and its interaction with the human body, and the juggernaut of industrial food. The former has hoodwinked us, he says, into believing it is a much more refined science than it is. In fact, such measures as calories and carbohydrates and vitamins are very crude tools, and science really is just beginning to understand how food works. Pollan writes, "The good news is that, to the carrot eater, it doesn't matter. That's the great thing about eating foods as compared with eating nutrients: You don't need to fathom a carrot's complexity in order to reap its benefits." Industrial food is that vast array of foodstuffs made from a handful of ingredients that have been refined so intensively they've lost most of their nutrient value: that stuffs American supermarkets and pours out of fast-food drive-throughs. It has produced a globe-circling epidemic of what are called "the Western diseases," because almost every group that begins to eat such a diet gets them: diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, obesity and some cancers. Obviously, Pollan points out, nutritionism has not prevented the spread of that life-threatening diet. Instead, it has abetted it: Every time we're warned to drop our carbs and pick up our proteins, or vice versa, nutritionism is helping the food industry sell us some product guaranteed to slim us down and fix us up. Forget about it, Pollan says. Eat food. That is, eat as various and fresh a diet as you can get. Pollan offers no restrictions or prescriptions, no charts or numbers. Instead, he proffers some general and easy tips, like "Eat meals" - not in the car, not at your desk or in front of the TV and not in a hurry. Make a meal a pleasure instead of a fuel stop, focus on flavors and aromas, and, he says, you're likely to eat more healthful food, and less of it. It's a smart, refreshing take on the traditional January topic: diet advice from a man who clearly loves to eat. Great-Grandma would be proud. Colette Bancroft can be reached at cbancroft@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8435. In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto By Michael Pollan Penguin Press, 244 pages, $21.95
[Last modified December 26, 2007, 16:12:11]
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