One. Reading Questions:
1. Contrary to the complicated edicts of nutritionism,
what simple edict of eating should we follow? 1: “Eat food. Not too much.
Mostly plants.” This has become a famous mantra. The problem is what
constitutes “food.” Not so simple in this age of nutritionism.
2. Why should you avoid products that make health
claims? 2. For 3 reasons: The claims are most likely false. The cost of any
such food product is inflated. The product is more of a product than it is
food.
3. On page 3, Pollan says there was an eating cultural
shift that was to our detriment. What was this shift? Two big shifts: Mother
was no longer the cook. She lost her authority to the scientists who have
intruded upon our eating with nutritionism. The second shift, related to
nutritionism, is the Big Lie of nutrition, which is that a low-fat diet is
essential to a healthy heart and overall good health. Americans actually gained
weight while incorporating this lie because in the absence of fat, they bulked
up on sugar, processed starch, and carbohydrates, which convert into fat and
triglycerides, which cause obesity and heart disease. Also see page 7. The
low-fat trend was unhealthy.
4. What is driving such relentless change in our
eating? See page 4. The 32-billion-dollar food marketing business constantly
must mix things up, have new things, just like Apple has to launch a new iPhone
or iMac every year or so. You must peddle new stuff, make the old stuff seem
obsolete, so you create the need for new food science, most of which is bogus.
These processed foods based on phony food science have a higher profit margin
than real food like a potato or a banana.
5. How flawed has science been in influencing our
diet? See pages 4-5. New studies keep coming out that contradict the previous
studies. Fiber is better, but then it’s not. Low-fat is better, but then it’s
not. All of these contradictions, confusions, and anxieties are linked to
Nutritionism.
6. What is the Dark Age of Nutritionism? It’s a sick
cocktail of the greedy food industry, fake nutrition science, and lousy,
mainstream journalism. Let’s call this cocktail 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. And to do this we must extirpate ourselves from
Nutritionism, which is both unwittingly and deliberately confusing and focus on
real food again.
8. Pollan writes that a lot of food we eat is not food
at all. Explain. We eat Pringles instead of potatoes. We eat banana chips
instead of bananas. We eat processed soybean oil instead of butter.
9. How
have we become a culture that “eats” to a culture that “feeds”? 7. We’ve lost
the joy of eating real food. In real food’s place, we eat processed food that
is measured by some phony barometer of nutritional value, which is soon to be
contradicted by the nutritionists. We eat and celebrate real food. We feed on
nutritional components. Some people’s diet is a series of nutritional
components, but as we shall see these isolated components do not interact with
the body for optimum health.
10. How is eating “scientifically” a sham that
degrades the human spirit and body? 8 We’ve become a nation of orthorexics,
obsessed with the myth of food purity and extra strength nutrition through
supplements and processed foods. Such obsessions, always worrying about
nutrition, the author speculates (and I agree) retard our happiness and make us
slaves to the Industrial Food Complex. One worry we should have is the Western
Diet, full of cheap processed carbs and sugars, which kills.
11. Contrast the French paradox with the American
paradox. 9. The French enjoy moderate portions of fat-rich food and don’t get
fat. They don’t obsess over what they eat. In contrast, Americans obsess over
their nutrition and binge and purge and eat in all sorts of extreme ways,
including crash diets, and they are fatter and unhappier than the French.
Part Two. The Characteristics of Nutritionism
1. We switch from eating food to eating nutrients.
This kills the joy of eating and we become feeders, not eaters.
2.
Nutritionism promoted the lipid hypothesis in 1977 and it made us follow the
wrong path. The theory is that a diet high in saturated animal fat leads to
heart disease. It became the unquestioned dogma (belief system) embraced by the
American Heart Association. The theory is only partly right. This high
animal-fat diet is dangerous when it’s part of the Western processed diet
lacking in vegetables. But as Weston Price discovered, cultures who eat animals
are very healthy, but their diet is Paleo or hunter oriented.
3. Nutritionism is not a science. It is an ideology
that joylessly places nutrients ahead of food. It is, Pollan argues, a flawed
and dangerous ideology.
4. Nutritionism 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.
5. The Good/Bad Theory of Nutritionism: 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:
Nutritionists focus too much on nutrients while forgetting how to judge the
foods themselves. Baby formula and margarine are putrid examples of the failure
of nutritionism.
6. Nutritionism is the official ideology of the Food
and Drug Administration and the American Heart Association. Pathetic.
7.
Nutritionism is beholden to the various food industries. For example,
politicians cannot focus on telling people to eat less meat, just less
nutrients. Therefore, nutritionism if focused on nutrients, not food. See page
24.
8. Nutritionism embraced chemicals, not food. So the
language of Nutritionism is chemical-based: polyunsaturated, beta-carotene,
antioxidants, probiotics, etc. This emphasized processed food and food
companies could “fortify” these chemicals into the processed food and charge us
more money and make higher profits even though these processed foods make us
LESS healthy because our bodies don’t interact with fortified processed foods
and isolated chemicals. We interact healthily with whole food, real foods.
9. Nutritionists, blinded by their ideology, make the
woeful and egregious mistake of reducing food into nutrients rather than
looking at foods as a whole entity.
10. The joyless puritanical Nutritionists ignore and
disdain the role of pleasure in eating. We digest and assimilate food better when
we ENJOY it. Hello.
11. One salient example of the arrogance and failure
of Nutritionism: their production of “baby formula,” which is an inferior
substitute for breast milk. See page 32.
12. One of the most enduring, inferior products of
Nutritionism: Margarine.
13. Why
did Americans grow fatter during the Era of Fake Low-Fat or Fake Nonfat
Products? We overate our “whole-grain” Cocoa Puffs, Lucky Charms and other
crap. 35-40.
14. What was the Coming Out Party for nutritionists?
Oat bran, 1988. See 37. Now new studies show that all those oat bran claims
were exaggerated and outright false.
15. How
were animals affected by nutritionism? See 37: leaner, often unhealthier
versions.
16. How did the Atkins diet affect carb foods in terms
of processing? 38
17. Why have pomegranates, avocadoes, and bananas, to
name a few foods, been spared processing and tinkering by the nutritionists?
38, 39. You can’t stick a health claim on a piece of fruit like you can a tub
of margarine or a box of cereal.
Part
Three. Some Real Food You Should Include in Your Diet, Sometimes Called “Super
Foods” (not a complete list):
1. Salmon
2. Blueberries
3. Almonds
4. Walnuts
5. Lentils
6. Beans
7. Tomatoes
8. Oranges
9. Oats
10.
Broccoli
11.
Spinach
12.
Dark greens
13.
Pomegranate
14.
Hot peppers
15.
Yams
Part
Four. Journal Entry
What
percentage of the food do you eat is processed and what percentage is real
food? What obstacles prevent you from eating more real food and eating less
processed food?
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