In Defense of Food Study Guide (page numbers refer to hardback version)

 

Study Questions:

 

1. What simple edict of eating should we follow? 1
2. Why should you avoid products that make health claims? 2
3. On page 3, Pollan says there was an eating cultural shift that was to our detriment. What was this shift? Also see page 7. The low-fat trend was unhealthy.
4. What is driving such relentless change in our eating? See page 4
5. How flawed has science been in influencing our diet? See pages 4-5.
6. Define the Age of Nutritionism. It’s a sick cocktail of the food industry, nutrition science, and journalism. The Conspiracy of Scientific Complexity. Nutrients won out over foods. See page 26.
7. What is Pollan’s central aim? 7 To reclaim our health and happiness as eaters.
8. Pollan writes that a lot of food we eat is not food at all. Explain.
9. How have we become a culture that “eats” to a culture that “feeds”? 7
10. How is eating “scientifically” a sham that degrades the human spirit and body? 8 We’ve become a nation of orthorexics. Such obsessions, the author speculates (and I agree) retard our happiness.
11. Contrast the French paradox with the American paradox. 9
12. What is the lipid hypothesis and how in 1977 did it misguide our eating path? 22-27. We replaced “food” with “nutrients.” Politicians learned not to single out foods, like beef, because the beef lobbyists or any other powerful lobbyists could destroy political careers. The studies were flawed: The culprit could have been a lack of vegetables in the diet, not exclusively a diet high in animal fat. See 25. See other factors on page 47.
13. What conditions set the stage for the Age of Nutritionism? See Chapter One.
14. What is nutritionism? See Chapter 2. It’s different from nutrition. It is not science; it is ideology. It offers a way of life through unexamined assumptions. (Reminds me of Mother Culture in the novel Ishmael). The ideology is to break food down into is parts or nutrients. The “priesthood” who can interpret these nutrients are the scientists and nutritionists. Nutritionism fanatically reduces eating to “promoting health” to the exclusion of pleasure and culture. In the context of the French paradox, nutritionism isn’t even good for you. Another belief: For every good nutrient is a bad one. As a result macronutrients are always at war. Protein vs. carbs, for example. Or refined carbs vs. fiber. Another huge flaw: They focus too much on nutrients while forgetting how to judge the foods themselves. Baby formula and margarine are putrid examples of the failure of nutritionsism. Nutritionism is the official ideology of the Food and Drug Administration.
15. How did nutritionism result in processed food and what are the implications of this? See Chapter 3.
16. How is margarine an example of fake food? What was fraud in 1906 became public health policy in 1973. See 35.
17. Why did Americans grow fatter during the Era of Fake Low-Fat or Fake Nonfat Products? 35
18. What was the Coming Out Party for nutritionists? Oat bran, 1988. See 37

 

19. How were animals affected by nutritionism? See 37: leaner versions.
20. How did the Atkins diet affect carb foods in terms of processing? 38
21. Why have pomegranates, avocadoes, and bananas, to name a few foods, been spared processing and tinkering by the nutritionists? 38, 39
22. Who does nutritionism help and hurt? Explain. 40
23. How has the lipid hypothesis influenced nutritionism and our health? See Chapter 5. Everything we’ve heard about nutrition the last 30 years is false.
24. Explain the danger of trans fats. 44
25. Why are scientists discouraged from being critical about their own work? 46, 27
26. How did nutritionists get fat all wrong? 49
27. How did our eating in accordance with nutritionist guidelines affect our weight? See Chapter 6.
28. How does nutritionism market more and more food? 51, 52
29. How has Puritanism combined with nutritionism to war against eating? 54 We have a history of puritanical, pseudo-scientific eating. Remember the crackpot theories of Dr. Kellogg.
30. How do carbohydrates (carbs) make us more fat than fat? 59
31. What is one of the misguided assumptions of nutritionism? Chapter 9, 61: Food is not a system but rather the sum of its nutrient parts. Scientists study variables they can isolate rather than look at nutrition in the whole context of food. This results in scientific reductionism, which can be misleading. Nutritionism for example doesn’t take into account the different ways different people metabolize foods. Also foods may act differently than the nutrients they contain.
32. What are the dangers of taking, as recommended by nutritionists, anti-oxidant supplements? See 64.
33. What is the zero-sum relationship with food that nutritionists ignore resulting in their egregiously wrong conclusions? 67
34. How does causation vs. correlation confuse our conclusions about nutrition and any conclusion we make? 70
35. What is one of the more “pernicious” effects of nutritionism? 71
36. What did the Nurse’s Study reveal about fat intake? 72, 73
37.  What were some flaws in the Nurse Study? 73
38. What are the signs of Orthorexia nervosa? 80
39. Contrast the Western Diet with the Hunter-Gatherer Diet. See Chapter 1, Part II.
40. What is the culprit in the Western Diet or as Pollan calls it “The Elephant in the Room”? 89
41. What did Weston Price learn about the Western Diet? See online: The Weston A. Price Foundation. He’s become a movement. Along with Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael, he critiques agricultural society and the food it spawns.
42. How does Weston Price point toward an exit sign to get us out of the nutritionism rut? 102, 103
43. How do whole grains, not refined grains, give us energy and contradict the dogma of nutritionism? 110, 111
44. How do Coca-Cola and many sweet cereals use nutritionism? 111
45. How does industrial agriculture compromise our nutrition? 116: Monocultures ruin diversity and diversity maximizes health and nutrition.
46. What’s the business model of the food industry? 117
47. What four crops account for two thirds of our daily calories and does this hurt us as omnivores? 117, 118
48. Why do bigger crops yield smaller nutrients? 118-122: crops grown with chemical fertilizers grow more quickly but that brief time doesn’t allow for nutrient growth. In contrast, organically grown crops have more phytochemicals, which translate into more healthy antioxidants for us. Industrial agriculture has created a new human being: one who is overfed but undernourished. This is the essence of a Western Diet: one that is high-calorie, low-nutrient. This results in a “destructive feedback loop,” that is, overeating. See 124.
49. What is the significance of Omega-6 and Omega-3s? 126-132 See neolipid hypothesis on page 140.
50. Before the modern food era of nutritionism, what did people rely on for learning how and what to eat? 133
51. What methods can we use (and must use) to escape the Western Diet? 143-: Look at not just food but how it’s produced (144); leave fast food and embrace slow food movement (145); avoid processed foods that make health claims (146); eat real food as opposed to fake food. We’re talking the potato vs. the potato chip; the egg vs. the egg substitute and we could go on.  (147); avoid food products with long ingredients lists (150); avoid food products that make health claims (154); shop on the sides of the market, not the middle (157); go to the farmer’s market instead of the super market (157); eat mostly plants, especially leaves (162); become a flexitarian, one who eats little meat (166); your health is affected by the food of the animals you eat (167); buy an extra freezer so you can keep a whole hog or whatnot (no, thank you) (168); eat diverse foods like an omnivore (169); eat well-grown food from healthy soils (169); eat wild foods (170); be the kind of person who takes supplements. A comment on causation over correlation (172); look to the Greeks, the French, the Japanese, the Italians, and the Indians (traditional diets from any ethnic culture) (173); be skeptical of nontraditional, processed foods (176); don’t look for the magic bullet in traditional diet. What he means is don’t look for a specific nutrient; it’s the whole approach (177)
52. How can we eat less? Pay more for food, eat less; sit down and eat a meal at a table instead of feeding; don’t eat alone; eat slowly; twenty minute rule; eat slowly; cook your own food; plant your own food.