In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

Fascinating book. I took lots of notes and highlights while reading it, hopefully I can pull them together soon, but the core of the book is "Eat Food, not too much, mostly plants".

(Saying food he makes the point of leaving out food-like or edible manufactured products, like Oreos, Fritos, Twinkies, Gatorade ...)

He investigates the impact of the Western diet as terribly wrong in many aspects. The impact of that diet into our health is a reality in the USA: more obesity (yet people are undernourished), more cardiovascular problems, diabetes, caries, digestive problems, cancer, allergies ... and how many of these are reversible in a rather short time span.

He goes on talking about the dangers of nutritional reductionism and nutrisionism (as an obsession), which inform policies, and the processed food market, into adding or removing elements without assessing interactions or the impact of those new combinations in our bodies.

I like his connection to culture and the pleasure of eating, and cooking. How little we spent in time, importance or priority to eat well, and think about food, about where it comes from, how it tastes, ...

At times perhaps too depressing or idealistic, but nonetheless very worth the read.

In spanish the name is "El detective en el supermercado"

Very interesting read. Food engineering has made food into food-like substances which contain little original nutrition of what they purport to be and have led to increased illnesses (obesity, diabetes, etc) since the Western diet has abandoned food for highly processed food. Nutritionists have been stymied by the search for the missing magical nutrient while ignoring overall dietary changes. Food manufacturers have enormous political influence (it is illegal in many states to criticise beef products, US guidelines allow 25% of daily calories to be sugar instead of WHO set levels of 10%) interfering with regulations and scientific investigations.

Michael Pollan gives a simple set of rules of thumb (eat food, eat mostly plants, eat less, don't eat food your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize, don't eat products with more than 5 ingredients, don't eat products with ingredients you don't know what they are, etc) to help guide back to diet which works for humans. Even then, it is a difficult path as industrial farming and industrial livestock has changed even raw foods (apples, beef, etc) into something simpler and far less nutritious than the same ingredient 50-100 years ago.

I eat well, especially with large amounts of food coming out of my garden, never eat fast food, rarely eat highly processed food, but this book makes me reconsider lots of the other foods I've been eating. I think I better clear another patch of ground to grow even more vegetables and get myself some chickens.

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." So begins a fascinating book about the author's attempts to understand how the current north American diet has become mire shaped by economic forces than nutritional value, and how the simple consumer can identify what is healthy vs unhealthy at the supermarket these days.

Pollan oversimplifies in places, but the result is still an excellent, thought-provoking and enlightening book that anybody concerned with eating healthily or living longer should read. It's changed the way I eat and feed my loved ones. I would highly recommend this book to pretty much everyone.

A great follow-up to The Omnivore's Dilemma. This book moves on from that one's coverage of how food is produced to ask the question "What should we be eating?" and comes away with a deceptively simple answer: "Food. Not too much. Mostly plants." The rest of the book breaks down that answer and tries to explain why it's not necessarily as self-evident as it first seems. Ask yourself how much time in the past week you actually spent really thinking about, enjoying, or making food. If the answer is less than a few hours, pick this book up and find out what you're missing.

Awesome; very informative, yet slightly over my head. It made me want to go learn more about the crap I put in my body.

If I hadn't enjoyed Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma so much, I probably would have put this one down after the first chapter. Pollan uses so many of the buzzwords I usually rely on to detect anti-scientific cranks that I honestly felt dirty pushing ahead and finishing the book. Over the course of just a few pages, he coins the term "nutritionism" to denote what he describes as a "reductionist" science that relies on a specially educated "priesthood" to tell the rest of us what to eat, in defiance of the cultural traditions we should instead rely on.

It does get better, and Pollan's guidelines for choosing meals (summed up in the book's first sentence, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.") are useful, and do, after all rely on recent scientific findings. His theme is that that nutrition science, by focusing on which particular nutrients are good and which are bad, has missed the possibility that there may be other factors in a healthy diet such as, to take just one example, the ratio of one nutrient to another, and that cultural culinary traditions, developed over long periods of time, may be a better guide to healthy eating. To his credit, he acknowledges the contradiction in opening with an assault on what he calls "nutritionism" and proceeding to use the findings of nutrition science to support his arguments, but he doesn't address the question of why he chose to open with his rhetorical assault on science in the first place.

There's some interesting stuff here, but it's overshadowed, in my opinion, by his gratuitous anti-scientific rhetoric.