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.