Book Report - In Defense of Food.

In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollen
Key Points
Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants

Eat Food

• Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food
• Avoid foods that contain
  o Unfamiliar ingredients
  o Unpronounceable ingredients
  o More than five ingredients
  o Contain high fructose corn syrup
• Avoid any food product that makes health claims
• Shop the peripheries of the store and avoid the central areas
• Get out of the supermarket.
  
  Mostly Plants
  There are an astonishing variety of traditional diets, some low fat, some high fat, but always built around whole foods
• Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.
• You are what you eat, eats: industrial meat production is bad for animals and for the creatures that eat them. Cattle fed on grains sicken and require antibiotics. Meat has naturally occurring Omega-3 fatty acids and conjugated Linolic Acids (which are very good for you) but the only souce of these nutrients is green leaves, i.e. grass and other browse.
• Buy a freezer and purchase PASTURE fed animals in bulk.
• Eat like an omnivore
• Eat well grown food from healthy soils.
• Eat wild foods, including wild animals if available.
• Take supplements
• Eat like the French, Italians, Indians or Greeks
• Regard non-traditional foods with skepticism
• Don’t look for the magic bullet in traditional diet.
• Have a glass of wine with your dinner.
  
  Not Too Much
• Pay more, eat less. Cheap, industrialized food is low in nutrients
• Eat less: 3 meals a day is plenty
• Do all your eating at a table (a desk is not a table)
• Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does.
• Try not to eat alone
• Consult your gut.
• Eat slowly
• Learn to cook or plant a garden.

I highly recommend this book for its thoughtful analysis of what constitutes food (as opposed to nutrition) and how industrial food has removed us further and further from healthy diets. Yoghurt is a simple product - milk and a bacterial culture - but look at any container of yoghurt in the dairy case.

Joining the CSA in 2008 was prescient; we're sticking with them and hoping to increase our green leafy ingestion.

I read "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by the same author while spending long hours in waiting rooms this past spring and it's a good read too. It's just that "In Defense of Food" offers some solutions to the Omnivore's dilemma.

Buy this book if you can afford it or borrow it or get it from the library. It could change your life.

Harvey