Educate Yourself: In Defense of Food, An Eater's Manifesto

Once or twice a week I'll post info - book description and table of contents - that you might like to read.

The book below is not one that will really help you lose/maintain weight, but it's got a lot of interesting stuff to say. It's for education only. They do mention an interesting new complex: Orthorexia nrevosa: An unhealthy obsession with healthy eating."

"A few years ago, Rozin sshowed a group of Americans the words "chocolate cake" and recorded theirword associations. "Guilt" was the top response. If that strikes youy as unexceptional, consider the response of the French eaters: "Celebration."

Americans -in particular women - feel guilty when they eat, or if they're even just 5 pound overweight, ad that just ain't right! [Frankly, the media is to blame, and the people who buy into that media. In the 1930s, several German actresses tried to get their start in American films - Marlene Dietrich being the most famous. They couldn't make a dent until they lost a lot of weight and glamorized up a bit, the way the media wanted American women to look, so as to sell cosmetics, weight loss products, etc.]

[The book below advocates cutting out pre-prepared meals - TV dinners, and snack foods, and giving up the microwave entirely. (When food takes less time to prepair, we eat more of it.) Of course this just puts more guilt on women...the ones who want to have a career and a family too and don't have time to spend three hours cooking a meal...but that's the topic for another post. I don't necessarily advocate the book below, I just present it as information for you to decide.)]

In Defense of Food, An Eater's Manifesto, by Michael Pollan
The Penguin Press, 2008
Food. There's plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why should anyone need to defend it?

Because most of what we're consuming today is not food, and how we're consuming it - in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone-is not really eating. Instead of food, we're consuming "edible foodlike substances"-no longer the products of nature but of food science. Many of them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy. In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.

But if real food-the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food-stands in need of defense, from whom does it need defending? From the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other. Both stand to gain much from widespread confusion about what to eat, a question that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert help. Yet the professionalization of eating has failed to make Americans healthier. Thirty years of official nutritional advice has only made us sicker and fatter while ruining countless number of meals.

Pollan proposes a new (and vvery old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. By urging us to once again eat food, he challenges the prevailing nutrient-by-nutrient approach-what he calls nutritionism-and proposes an alternative way of eating that is informed by the traditions and ecology of real, well-grown, and unprocessed food. Our personal health, he argues, cannot be divorced from the health of the food chains of which we are apart.

In Defense of Food shows us how, despite the daunting dietary landscape Americans confront in the modern supermarket, we can escape the Western diet and, by doing so, most of the chronic diseases that diet causes. We can relearn which foods are healthy, develop simple ways to moderate our appetites, and return eating to its proper context-out of the car and back to the table. Michael Pollan's bracing and eloquent manifesto shows how we can start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives, enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy, and bring pleasure back to eating.

Table of Contents
Introduction: An Eater's Manifesto
I. The Age of Nutritionism
1. From foods to nutrients
2. Nutritionism defined
3. Nutritionism goes to market
4. Food science's golden age
5. The melting of the lipid hypothesis
6. Eat right, get fatter
7. Beyond the pleasure principle
8. The proof in the low-fat pudding
9. Bad science
10. Nutritionism's children

II. The Western diet and diseases of civilization
1. The aborigine in all of us
2. The elephant in the room
3. The Industrialization of eating: what we do know:
-From whole foods to refined
-From complexity to simplicity
-From quality to quantity
-From leaves to seeds
-From food culture to food science

III. GEtting over Nutritionism
1. Escape from the Western diet
2. Eat food: food defined
3. Mostly plants: What to eat
4. Not too much: How to eat

Acknowledgments
Sources
Resources
Index