In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

by Michael Pollan

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

If you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

Science has much of value to teach us about food, and perhaps someday scientists will “solve” the problem of diet, creating the nutritionally optimal meal in a pill, but for now and the foreseeable future, letting the scientists decide the menu would be a mistake. They simply do not know enough.

Not only does nutritionism favor ever more novel kinds of highly processed foods (which are by far the most profitable kind to make), it actually enlists the medical establishment and the government in the promotion of those products.

The two diet gurus were united in their contempt for animal protein, the consumption of which Dr. Kellogg, a Seventh-Day Adventist who bore a striking resemblance to KFC’s Colonel Sanders, firmly believed promoted both masturbation and the proliferation of toxic bacteria in the colon.

“The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science,” points out Marion Nestle, a New York University nutritionist, “is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of the food, the food out of the context of the diet, and the diet out of the context of the lifestyle.”

a nutrient bias is built into the way science is done. Scientists study variables they can isolate; if they can’t isolate a variable, they won’t be able to tell whether its presence or absence is meaningful. Yet even the simplest food is a hopelessly complicated thing to analyze, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in intricate and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another. So if you’re a nutrition scientist you do the only thing you can do, given the tools at your disposal: Break the thing down into its component parts and study those one by one, even if that means ignoring subtle interactions and contexts and the fact that the whole may well be more than, or maybe just different from, the sum of its parts. This is what we mean by reductionist science.

That’s the great thing about eating foods as compared with nutrients: You don’t need to fathom a carrot’s complexity in order to reap its benefits.

scientists make a second, related error when they attempt to study the food out of the context of the diet. We eat foods in combinations and in orders that can affect how they’re metabolized. The carbohydrates in a bagel will be absorbed more slowly if the bagel is spread with peanut butter; the fiber, fat, and protein in the peanut butter cushion the insulin response, thereby blunting the impact of the carbohydrates.

what people don’t eat may matter as much as what they do.

the problem with a meat-heavy diet might not even be the meat itself but the plants that all that meat has pushed off the plate. We just don’t know. But eaters worried about their health needn’t wait for science to settle this question before deciding that it might be wise to eat more plants and less meat.

The zero-sum fallacy of nutrition science poses another obstacle to nailing down the effect of a single nutrient. As Gary Taubes points out, it’s difficult to design a dietary trial of something like saturated fat because as soon as you remove it from the trial diet, either you have dramatically reduced the calories in that diet or you have replaced the saturated fat with something else: other fats (but which ones?), or carbohydrates (but what kind?), or protein. Whatever you do, you’ve introduced a second variable into the experiment, so you will not be able to attribute any observed effect strictly to the absence of saturated fat. It could just as easily be due to the reduction in calories or the addition of carbohydrates or polyunsaturated fats. For every diet hypothesis you test, you can construct an alternative hypothesis based on the presence or absence of the substitute nutrient. It gets messy.

“To really know what a person is eating you’d have to have a second invisible person following them around, taking photographs, looking at ingredients, and consulting accurate food composition tables, which we don’t have.” When you report on an FFQ that you ate a carrot, the tabulator consults a U.S. Department of Agriculture database to determine exactly how much calcium or beta-carotene that carrot contained. But because all carrots are not created equal, their nutrient content varying with everything from the variety planted and type of soil it was planted in to the agriculture system used (organic? conventional?) and the carrot’s freshness, these tables suffer from their own inaccuracies.

A few years ago, Rozin presented a group of Americans with the following scenario: “Assume you are alone on a desert island for one year and you can have water and one other food. Pick the food that you think would be best for your health.” The choices were corn, alfalfa sprouts, hot dogs, spinach, peaches, bananas, and milk chocolate. The most popular choice was bananas (42 percent), followed by spinach (27 percent), corn (12 percent), alfalfa sprouts (7 percent), peaches (5 percent), hot dogs (4 percent), and milk chocolate (3 percent). Only 7 percent of the participants chose one of the two foods that would in fact best support survival: hot dogs and milk chocolate.

So this is what putting science, and scientism, in charge of the American diet has gotten us: anxiety and confusion about even the most basic questions of food and health, and a steadily diminishing ability to enjoy one of the great pleasures of life without guilt or neurosis.

while nutritionism has its roots in a scientific approach to food, it’s important to remember that it is not a science but an ideology, and that the food industry, journalism, and government bear just as much responsibility for its conquest of our minds and diets. All three helped to amplify the signal of nutritionism: journalism by uncritically reporting the latest dietary studies on its front pages; the food industry by marketing dubious foodlike products on the basis of tenuous health claims; and the government by taking it upon itself to issue official dietary advice based on sketchy science in the first place and corrupted by political pressure in the second.

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.

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.

Ripeness, which is the moment when the seeds of the plant are ready to go off and germinate, typically coincides with the greatest concentration of nutrients in a fruit, so the interests of the plant (for transportation) align with those of the plant eater (for nutriment).

Our bodies, having received these signals and determined this fruit is good to eat, now produce in anticipation precisely the enzymes and acids needed to break it down. Health depends heavily on knowing how to read these biological signals: This looks ripe; this smells spoiled; that’s one slick-looking cow. This is much easier to do when you have long experience of a food and much harder when a food has been expressly designed to deceive your senses with, say, artificial flavors or synthetic sweeteners. Foods that lie to our senses are one of the most challenging features of the Western diet.

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In the natural world, fructose is a rare and precious thing, typically encountered seasonally in ripe fruit, when it comes packaged in a whole food full of fiber (which slows its absorption) and valuable micronutrients.

With the result that today corn contributes 554 calories a day to America’s per capita food supply and soy another 257. Add wheat (768 calories) and rice (91) and you can see there isn’t a whole lot of room left in the American stomach for any other foods.

When you consider that humankind has historically consumed some eighty thousand edible species, and that three thousand of these have been in widespread use, this represents a radical simplification of the human diet. Why should this concern us? Because 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.

it doesn’t help that the raw materials used in the manufacture of processed foods have declined in nutritional quality or that when we are eating whole foods, we’re getting substantially less nutrition per calorie than we used to.*

Crops grown with chemical fertilizers grow more quickly, giving them less time and opportunity to accumulate nutrients other than the big three (nutrients in which industrial soils are apt to be deficient anyway). Also, easy access to the major nutrients means that industrial crops develop smaller and shallower root systems than organically grown plants; deeply rooted plants have access to more soil minerals.

Since 1980, American farmers have produced an average of 600 more calories per person per day, the price of food has fallen, portion sizes have ballooned, and, predictably, we’re eating a whole lot more, at least 300 more calories a day than we consumed in 1985.

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.

Medicine is learning how to keep alive the people whom the Western diet is making sick.

Diabetes is well on its way to becoming normalized in the West—recognized as a whole new demographic and so a major marketing opportunity. Apparently it is easier, or at least a lot more profitable, to change a disease of civilization into a lifestyle than it is to change the way that civilization eats.

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

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

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.

GET OUT OF THE SUPERMARKET WHENEVER POSSIBLE.

Shake the hand that feeds you.

EAT MOSTLY PLANTS, ESPECIALLY LEAVES.

YOU ARE WHAT WHAT YOU EAT EATS TOO.

IF YOU HAVE THE SPACE, BUY A FREEZER.

EAT LIKE AN OMNIVORE.

EAT WELL-GROWN FOOD FROM HEALTHY SOILS.

EAT WILD FOODS WHEN YOU CAN.

BE THE KIND OF PERSON WHO TAKES SUPPLEMENTS.

REGARD NONTRADITIONAL FOODS WITH SKEPTICISM.

DON’T LOOK FOR THE MAGIC BULLET IN THE TRADITIONAL DIET.

HAVE A GLASS OF WINE WITH DINNER.

people who drink moderately and regularly live longer and suffer considerably less heart disease than teetotalers. Alcohol of any kind appears to reduce the risk of heart disease, but the polyphenols in red wine (resveratrol in particular) appear to have unique protective qualities. The benefits to your heart increase with the amount of alcohol consumed up to about four drinks a day (depending on your size), yet drinking that much increases your risk of dying from other causes (including certain cancers and accidents), so most experts recommend no more than two drinks a day for men, one for women.

PAY MORE, EAT LESS.