In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

by Michael Pollan

We have barely begun to understand the relationships among foods in a cuisine.

Nutrition science has usually put more of its energies into the idea that the problems it studies are the result of too much of a bad thing instead of too little of a good thing. Is this good science or nutritionist prejudice? The epidemiologist John Powles has suggested this predilection is little more than a Puritan bias: Bad things happen to people who eat bad things.

It’s worth keeping in mind that a far more powerful predictor of heart disease than either diet or exercise is social class.

The uncomfortable fact is that the entire field of nutritional science rests on a foundation of ignorance and lies about the most basic question of nutrition: What are people eating?

As Rozin points out, “Worrying so much about food can’t be very good for your health.”

some of the most deleterious effects of the Western diet could be so quickly reversed. It appears that, at least to an extent, we can rewind the tape of the nutrition transition and undo some of its damage. The implications for our own health are potentially significant.*

What we know is that people who eat the way we do in the West today suffer substantially higher rates of cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and obesity than people eating any number of different traditional diets.

In lengthening the food chain so that we could feed great cities from distant soils, we were breaking the “rules of nature” at least twice: by robbing nutrients from the soils the foods had been grown in and then squandering those nutrients by processing the foods.

The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them.

What would happen if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?

Our personal health cannot be divorced from the health of the entire food web.

Foods that lie to our senses are one of the most challenging features of the Western diet.

Contrary to the nutrition label, not all carbohydrates are created equal.

A whole food might be more than the sum of its nutrient parts.

The energy density of these refined carbohydrates contributes to obesity in two ways. First, we consume many more calories per unit of food; the fiber that’s been removed from these foods is precisely what would have made us feel full and stop eating. Also, the flash flood of glucose causes insulin levels to spike and then, once the cells have taken all that glucose out of circulation, drop precipitously, making us think we need to eat again.

science doesn’t know nearly enough to compensate for everything that processing does to whole foods.

humans are omnivores, requiring somewhere between fifty and a hundred different chemical compounds and elements in order to be healthy. It’s hard to believe we’re getting everything we need from a diet consisting largely of processed corn, soybeans, rice, and wheat.

you now have to eat three apples to get the same amount of iron as you would have gotten from a single 1940 apple, and you’d have to eat several more slices of bread to get your recommended daily allowance of zinc than you would have a century ago.

You don’t need to spend much time in an American supermarket to figure out that this is a food system organized around the objective of selling large quantities of calories as cheaply as possible.

A diet based on quantity rather than quality has ushered a new creature onto the world stage: the human being who manages to be both overfed and undernourished, two characteristics seldom found in the same body in the long natural history of our species.

a food system organized around quantity rather than quality has a destructive feedback loop built into it, such that the more low-quality food one eats, the more one wants to eats, in a futile—but highly profitable—quest for the absent nutrient.

Clinical studies have found that increasing the omega-3s in one’s diet may reduce the chances of heart attack by a third.†

Before the modern food era—and before the rise of nutritionism—people relied for guidance about what to eat on their national or ethnic or regional cultures.

Much lip service is paid to the importance of prevention, but the health care industry, being an industry, stands to profit more handsomely from new drugs and procedures to treat chronic diseases than it does from a wholesale change in the way people eat.

instead of worrying about nutrients, we should simply avoid any food that has been processed to such an extent that it is more the product of industry than of nature.

In order to eat well we need to invest more time, effort, and resources in providing for our sustenance, to dust off a word, than most of us do today.

Ordinary food is still out there, however, still being grown and even occasionally sold in the supermarket, and this ordinary food is what we should eat.

DON’T EAT ANYTHING YOUR GREAT GRANDMOTHER WOULDN’T RECOGNIZE AS FOOD.

“Just don’t eat anything your Neolithic ancestors wouldn’t have recognized and you’ll be ok.”

Don’t eat anything incapable of rotting is another personal policy you might consider adopting.

Foods that lie leave us with little choice but to eat by the numbers, consulting labels rather than our senses.

AVOID FOOD PRODUCTS CONTAINING INGREDIENTS THAT ARE A) UNFAMILIAR, B) UNPRONOUNCEABLE, C) MORE THAN FIVE IN NUMBER, OR THAT INCLUDE D) HIGH-FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP.

AVOID FOOD PRODUCTS THAT MAKE HEALTH CLAIMS. For a food product to make health claims on its package it must first have a package, so right off the bat it’s more likely to be a processed than a whole food.

SHOP THE PERIPHERIES OF THE SUPERMARKET AND STAY OUT OF THE MIDDLE. Most supermarkets are laid out the same way: Processed food products dominate the center aisles of the store while the cases of ostensibly fresh food—dairy, produce, meat, and fish—line the walls. If you keep to the edges of the store you’ll be that much more likely to wind up with real food in your shopping cart.

GET OUT OF THE SUPERMARKET WHENEVER POSSIBLE. You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmers’ market. You also won’t find any elaborately processed food products, any packages with long lists of unpronounceable ingredients or dubious health claims, nothing microwavable, and, perhaps best of all, no old food from far away. What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of their taste and nutritional quality—precisely the kind your great grandmother, or even your Neolithic ancestors, would easily have recognized as food.

the surest way to escape the Western diet is simply to depart the realms it rules: the supermarket, the convenience store, and the fast-food outlet.

When you eat from the farmers’ market, you automatically eat food that is in season, which is usually when it is most nutritious. Eating in season also tends to diversify your diet—because you can’t buy strawberries or broccoli or potatoes twelve months of the year, you’ll find yourself experimenting with other foods when they come into the market.

Cooking is one of the most important health consequences of buying food from local farmers;

Local produce is typically picked ripe and is fresher than supermarket produce, and for those reasons it should be tastier and more nutritious.

If you can manage to just eat food most of the time, whatever that food is, you’ll probably be okay. One lesson that can be drawn from the striking diversity of traditional diets that people have lived on around the world is that it is possible to nourish ourselves from an astonishing range of different foods, so long as they are foods.

EAT MOSTLY PLANTS, ESPECIALLY LEAVES.

(It stands to reason that the more toxins there are in the environment, the more plants you should be eating.)

Unlike plants, which we can’t live without, we don’t need to eat meat—with the exception of vitamin B 12, every nutrient found in meat can be obtained somewhere else. (And the tiny amount of B12 we need is not too hard to come by; it’s found in all animal foods and is produced by bacteria, so you obtain B 12 from eating dirty or decaying or fermented produce.) But meat, which humans have been going to heroic lengths to obtain and have been relishing for a very long time, is nutritious food, supplying all the essential amino acids as well as many vitamins and minerals, and I haven’t found a compelling health reason to exclude it from the diet.

Several studies point to the conclusion that the more meat there is in your diet—red meat especially—the greater your risk of heart disease and cancer. Yet studies of flexitarians suggest that small amounts of meat—less than one serving a day—don’t appear to increase one’s risk.

YOU ARE WHAT WHAT YOU EAT EATS TOO. That is, the diet of the animals we eat has a bearing on the nutritional quality, and healthfulness, of the food itself, whether it is meat or milk or eggs.

It’s worth looking for pastured animal foods in the market and paying the premium they typically command.

IF YOU HAVE THE SPACE, BUY A FREEZER. When you find a good source of pastured meat, you’ll want to buy it in quantity.

EAT LIKE AN OMNIVORE. Whether or not you eat any animal foods, it’s a good idea to try to add some new species, and not just new foods, to your diet.

EAT WELL-GROWN FOOD FROM HEALTHY SOILS. It would have been much simpler to say “eat organic” because it is true that food certified organic is usually well grown in relatively healthy soils—soils that have been nourished by organic matter rather than synthetic fertilizers. Yet there are exceptional farmers and ranchers in America who for one reason or another are not certified organic and the food they grow should not be overlooked. Organic is important, but it’s not the last word on how to grow food well.

EAT WILD FOODS WHEN YOU CAN. Two of the most nutritious plants in the world are weeds—lamb’s quarters and purslane—and some of the healthiest traditional diets, such as the Mediterranean, make frequent use of wild greens.