Cheap Therapy

Over the last week I’ve ploughed through Michael Pollan’s book about the rise of Nutritionism, and why, despite so much dietary research, people eating the “Western diet” are less healthy than ever.

The book is “In Defense of Food”, where ‘food’ is actual stuff that is grown, rather than produced in a factory.

Perhaps the major revelations for me were

• how lobbying allowed manufacturers to avoid having to put the word ‘imitation’ on their product labels. And how lobbying lead to Nutritionism. Because it’s not something produced by cattle ranchers (who vote) that’s bad, it’s saturated fat, or other non-industry-specific components
• that optimising a food for a long shelf life means removing nutrients from it, which means that people need to eat more of it to get the same nutritional effect
• roller milling of flour (as opposed to grinding between a traditional mill’s grindstones) results in the nice white flour that doesn’t go rancid. Of course the problem with this is that it also removes the nutrients! Thus there was a sudden outbreak of dietary deficiency related illnesses and they had to fortify the flour. But have have food scientists missed out anything that has long term effects. Who knows?
• you are what what you eat eats – intensive agricultural methods using synthetic fertilizers are reducing the micronutrients in the soil, and thus in the food

Pollan’s a journalist, and his style is very approachable. Definitely worth a read if you are the sort of person who eats!